For the Last Time
by Henry Stone
Summary: Events in a far-off future set a panic in motion, when a Terminator chased by hunters, demons and government agents penetrates Stargate Command to rip a whole through time and space to let loose millenia worth of havoc on our time! While the madness unfolds, can the Doctor track down those behind it all?


Chapter 1

The morning sky was dusty. The combination of the suns still red light and all the particles in the air left a slightly disturbing hue of crimson, almost like blood splatter in a fog. In the thin, reddish haze of that early light, a man sat on a rock.

Quiet, completely alone, he sat holding a small tool in his hands, a metallic item with inserted pieces of colored, glass-like material. It was quite clearly broken, parts of it dangling from the main cylinder he held. He had an aura of exhaustion over him, complimented by a few scratches here and there and some dirt on his dark jacket and the legs of his pants. He was lost in thoughts, going through complicated events, finding patterns and devising conclusions based on them. It was all mostly busy-work, however; he already knew the patterns that were important.

"I do really hate this, old friend," he said softly to the broken tool, as he held it up in front of his face, as if to inspect the damage more closely. He then pulled a slightly bigger cylindrical case, all one smooth piece of brass, from somewhere inside the jacket, frowning slightly as he did. The air was getting more difficult to breathe as morning grew, the dust in it becoming greasy with vapors of water and things more foul. Gently, as if handling strands of crystal glass, or a sensitive explosive, he slid the broken tool into the brass cannister through a small hole in its top that had appeared. As the last bit of the tool was carefully helped inside, the cannister top closed by itself, like a bubble gum bubble being popped in reverse.

"I do really hate this," he repeated, as he stood up. He then turned his gaze to the horizon, where the sun's rays were becoming a more familiar yellow, though still through a dusty, grey sky. The man then cracked a smile and made an excited little jump on the spot, before he turned around and took a few steps towards a big, blue box nearby.

At this point, the sound of the gigantic machines crushing their way towards him would have shattered any normal human being's eardrums.

"Yes, I said, I'm coming!" shouted Rose, as the pounding on the door became louder. She had to fight the contents of her fridge a bit longer than she liked, making sure the horribly botched game of food tetris did not explode in an avalanche of perishable goods that had probably already, well, perished.

"You finally got what you went out for, I guess?"

Her words caused no response, but she could clearly hear the grunting of the Doctor making his way through the hallway. It had taken him a good few hours to run his errand, but that had given her some time to have a bit of peace of mind. He had been talking quite excitedly about meeting an old friend before he went, and letting her ears rest was just one of life's little pleasures. What he needed to do before that meeting was beyond her, but even a centuries old alien had his rights to privacy.

The sound of a lud bang and crash made her finally slam the refrigerator door shut and go to see what was happening. To her surprise, the Doctor was spawled against one wall, leaning awkwardly against anything in his reach, his arms flailing desperately about him to keep his long body from falling over. For a moment, Rose stood motionless. The look in his eyes was completely new to her, and she instinctively waited for him to tell her how to help.

"Eh uhu habluga," was the only thing to come from his mouth. Briefly, she wondered if he was talking some odd or arcane language, but as he started flapping against the wall in an apparent effort not to slide to the floor, she realized he was simply not making any sense.

Surprisingly heavy for his skinny build, Rose managed to get the clearly disoriented Doctor to a couch before she nearly collapsed herself in a fit of exhaustion. The man slumped down, still staring into the room as if watching something invisible with complete surprise.

"Hudadish," he mumbled, then repeated it a bit louder, looking around the room as if in a panic. Rose tried to spot what he was looking at, but his gaze seemed to just jump around at random.

"Who that is?" she asked, trying to translate the incoherent mumbles of the man now fumbling about on the couch to stay upright. "It's me, Rose. Are you alright?" She knew that last question was about the dumbest one she could have asked. Whether the Doctor was shaking his head at that exact fact or because she was not getting the message was unclear to her.

"Dadadish!" he half yelled, half belched, jumping to an almost fully seated pose, his eyes finally meeting Rose's. He then proceeded to throw a small key clear across the room, obviously not in full control of his limbs yet. Rose looked at where the key's path through the air had been, befuddled as to what the Doctor was trying to tell her. Looking back at him, she moved a bit side to side. As she had expected, his head turned about a second too slowly. He was clearly very much out of...

"The TARDIS!" she cried out, finally getting a full translation of mumble to English compelted in her mind. The highly disoriented, slow to react Doctor broke a wide smile and gave a clumsy thumbs-up, before he became a bit too fascinated with the thumb he had held up in front of his own face. As he moved the finger back and forth, trying to adjust his eyesight by it, Rose quickly found the small key on the floor.

Running to the door, grabbing her coat as she passed it by, she stopped one last time in the doorway, looking back through it to see the Doctor in the living room at the end. He was making a weird gesture with his flat hand, like a very drunk person trying to pet a small dog.

"Begotten!" he yelled at her. She made the same gesture in the air for a few seconds, before her brain caught the underlying message. "Big button?" she asked back, and the man grinned and waved before leaning back on the couch, again fascinated by his hand.

Chapter 2

The door was filthy, and the room beyond it was completely dark. As the sides of the door slid open automatically with a crunchy, disgusting sound, light from the elevator flooded the basement room, both with actual light and with long, creepy shadows. The one thing that did not make much of a shadow was the sole occupant of the elevator, a short figure standing in a very uncomfortable pose. He was not that happy about elevators. Or automatic doors. They had a tendency to malfunction.

Stepping inside the still rather dark room, the figure nonetheless spotted his target immediately. There was nothing else there, really, so the hulking shape stood out quite clearly. Humming to himself, he strolled over to the thing, making an almost proud stride. This was what he had been looking for, all this time. This was what he needed. He pulled out a small memory card, clutching it with childlike excitement in his hand!

Whoever had left the thing here had never even covered it with a tarp, or put it in some form of box. It smelled bad, and despite his eager, the short figure hesitated for a second, holding his hand up to his nose. This thing smelled worse than the stinking city! But it was not the fragrance of the thing that he needed, oh no, not at all!

Touching the things apparent head in the dark, he searched it for what the handsome stranger had told him to find. It took a little while, but in the end, there it was! A small gap near the lower neck of... whatever this thing was called. Standing almost on his toes, the short figure slid the memory card into the gap with a slight chuckle. Nothing happened. He let out a frustrated groan and immediately kicked the big piece of garbage, but it was like kicking a... actually, it was very much like kicking a big piece of garbage.

Fumbling around at the little gap at the things neck, he pulled out the memory card, looked at it, then flipped it over and put it back in. Suddenly, a hum went through the big piece of garbage, and he stood back to watch, rubbing his hands together in anticipation. The massive shape shuddered a bit, as systems inside of it turned on one by one and began to run diagnostics on it. It had been there for quite some time, and there was a lot to check up on.

The short figure stepped in front of it, standing stiff as a soldier should. He made his best effort not to let emotions take over and simply hug the big thing, satisfying himself with merely watching as it stood up. It was a writhing mass of muscles, a herculean physical form! It was marvelous, and he would... okay, apparently, it was also naked.

As the mountain of muscled man-machine finally stood erect, in the non-disturbing sense of the word, the short figure read the card again that the stranger had given him. This would be his dawn of triumph! "Klatu verata nictu," the card said. Odd words, but an activation code was an activation code, after all.

He didn't even get a sound out before the huge fake human punched a hole in the top of the basement wall and began digging its way out.

Chapter 3

Taking care not to stumble too much as she made her way through the forest around her, Rose kept her hand tightly closed around the small key. When she first stood in the street about an hour earlier, she had realized that she had no idea where to go. She had at first expected the TARDIS to be outside, in plain view, but there were no signs of it. Among other things, that isntantly made her wonder how far the Doctor had dragged himself in his condition!

Luckily, the key made a slight tug in one particular direction. Not a hard tug, the kind that would fling it from her hand and into the street, but a gentle tug, the kind that seemed simply to tell her to go that way. The kind that one might mistake for a hallucination. Especially when dealing with time travelling aliens!

And this was where it led to. Epping Forest. Had it been a sunny day and she been simply out to relax and enjoy herself, the place would have been a delight. As it happened, London was cold enough that she regretted wasting time getting things into her fridge at all earlier, and evening was making its way over the forest, making it horribly creepy. She had a torch along, but she would still prefer a comfy sit on the couch and something bad on the telly, maybe even an unhealthy snack. Dark forests were in neither of those categories.

Having left the man-made paths once the key tugged in a direction impossible to follow in any other way, she had been making her way through branches and brush for a good few minutes, cursing every one of them that slapped her in the face or grapped her foot enough to make her almost trip and fall. Then, without warning, she stepped into a clering. Not a public clearing, it was too crude and clumsily shaped for that. There was broken wood everywhere, and the brush was still strong as ever as she tried to move forward.

The one very fine thing about it, however, was that there were no more shadows of tall trees blocking her view of the land. The late sun was able to piercce through or slip over most of it, making it no less spooky but a lot more visible.

What was odd was that there seemed to be no real pattern to the destruction. Patches of trees were levelled or ripped apart halfway up, then a bigger area seemed more pushed aside, trees leaning with roots coming out of the ground. It seemed less like something had been on a rampage, and more like a good handful of things had been on a series of each their own little rampages. Finally, the key stopped tugging on her hand gently, and she stopped.

Tilted against a large rock in the forest, the TARDIS seemed largely unharmed, but dirty as she had never seen it before. It had black stripes from superficial burns, dirt and mud smeared everywhere, leaves and small branches sticking to it all over. It looked for all intents and purposes as if someone had dragged it through someone's collection of filth, then rolled it down a nearby hill. Everything seemed intact, even the windows, and the light on the top was on and spinning, but it looked more like an accident of fate that it was not bits and pieces strewn across the forest floor, like many of the trees were!

Stepping into the thing was unusually discomforting. Rose had piled a few bits of broken trees outside its door to reach, using the key to open the door, but the oddity of it was the tilt. As her foot passed through the door, gravity shifted from the outside direction to the inside one, making her feel as if she was about to fall down a flight of stairs. Supporting her hands on the doorframe, she managed to make the transition, only to nerly bang her head on... something.

The inside of the TARDIS looked insane. To an unfamiliar eye, it would look like it had been badly damage inside during whatever had happened. Rose, however, could see that however chaotic things looked, they were largely intentional. "Redecorated, have we?" she mumbled to herself as she made it comfortably inside the tilted doorway. Turning around, she could see the destruction of the forest from the perspective of the TARDIS, and it gave a slightly clearer view of what might well have happened! The patterns swirled out from it, patches forming almost the equivalent of crop circles. The TARDIS had crashed, and in a messy, probably rather spectacular way.

She looked at all the strange new things inside of it, letting her hands run over the surface of new features that filled the control room, almost to test that they were real and physical. It was not just a modificatoin here and there, it was everywhere! What looked like support beams of colorful metals ran across the room from every angle, and thick cables followed and jumped between them. It looked like how a bored child might decorate the TARDIS, and knowing the Doctor, she would not be surprised to find out that was more or less the nature of it.

As she made her way closer to the controls, she felt uneasy. She had felt something like it before, but not quite like this. The TARDIS was hurting. Psychic energies were leaking out somewhere, filling her with a horrible mix of sadness and worry, as if she was sensing the suffering of a wounded animal. Out of nothing but instinct, she looked around to find something in clear need of repair, but she soon realized that even if something was damaged badly enough for her to spot it, that would only mean that it was too badly damaged for her to do anything about.

The button. The big button. It had been the one instruction that the Doctor had insisted on giving her. Rose looked around the controls in the center of the room, desperately hoping that whatever this button was, it was not part of the many and confusing additions that had been made to the TARDIS since last she saw it. As luck would have it, three big buttons to her far right seemed to match the description! Moving through the modifications taking care not to hit her head or snag her hair on any of it, her mind was filling up with worries about how she would know which one was the right big button of the three. Reaching them, she looked at them one by one. The last one had a paper note put on it with scotch tape. "This one!" it proclaimed, the dot over the eye drawn as a smiley face.

"Well, I guess..." was all she said before making the flat-handed slapping motion that the Doctor had shown her, pushing the big button down.

Chapter 4

"This way, it's... it's this way." The sun was slowly beginning to illuminate the streets of Los Angeles, as the two FBI agents pushed through the rubble of yet another crumbling wall. The place had looked bad in the past, that much showed, but the new damage stood oout clearly.

"Would you please just use a flashlight, Mulder?" said the agent falling deliberately behind. Her partner turned to her with a mix of surprise and childlike grin on his face. "Where's your sense of adventure, Dana?" he uttered, raising his arms for added drama. The woman gave him a stern frown. "Where is your sense of batteries, I might ask back?" she said, dryly. The man, Mulder, gave out a muffled chuckle as he went back past her, going for their rental car and his tools.

"You know, if we had stopped a bit less and risked a bit more, maybe we would have been on this thing's heels already," he argued, clearly trying to provoke her obvious frustrations. They had stopped more than once on their way there, his partner, Dana Scully, insisting that they verified the path of destruction. His argument that it was L.A., destruction was everywhere and would take ages to sort through, had done nothing to change her mind. In the end, of course, whatever they were tracking down was fairly novel about its destructive tendencies.

"Mulder, did you even pay attention to the witness statements? This is not a thing, it's a man. A big man on some kind of drugs or anger-induced rampage. It's not a big mystery, there's even blood to prove it. Human blood." She pulled her trenchcoat a bit closer around her, annoyed by the morning chill. L.A. was supposed to be warm and sunny. Why couldn't they be dealing what that L.A. instead of cold industrial districts.

Mulder passed her by again, this time carrying a somewhat oversized flashlight. Turning it on with an audible click, he instantly lit up a sizable area of the place. Although the destruction was very localized, it made up for that with its obvious efficiency.

"You may say drugs or crazy, Scully," he said just loud enough for her to hear him, "but what kind of insane junkie never strays from the direction he's heading?" Mulder stood for a moment, looking from spot to spot in the factory they had followed this person to. It was perfectly true that there seemed to be no sense to his actions as such, and that a crazy person fit the profile quite well. But the determination with which he had made his way through the streets of Los Angeles, and the brutality with which he had thrown people aside and damaged cars and property was beyond normal dopeheads, no matter what they were high on.

"Scully, what's east-northeast of Los Angeles?" He looked back at his partner, who seemed outright startled at this simple, down-to-earth question. Thinking for a few seconds, she shrugged a bit. "Only thing that comes to mind is Las Vegas," she answered. Her voice was still trying to be critical of his assumptions, but she had to admit, there was something odd to how clear their prey was about the direction he was taken, even if about nothing else.

Mulder grumbled a bit, thrown off by the lack of a clear destination. "What do you say, Scully, think maybe we're just dealing with the world's most desperately compulsive gambler?" She did not answer him.

Back at the police line, the five or so police officers currently present were enjoying their morning coffee, fresh from the nearby overpriced coffee shop. One of the officers, a young man who was clearly a bit nervous about looking professional enough, handed Scully hers. "One cream, no sugar, right?" She nodded with a smile. "You ever see something like this?" he asked, trying to seem like it was just out of interest. It clearly wasn't, though. Like most others there, he was startled by the raw violence of the event. The windshield of the minivan was still in the street, bits of it strewn around, blood on most of them. The car itself had been moved to let paramedics get access to the wounded, two of which were now covered with plastic, the third having been rushed off to the hospital. Across the street, a family sedan was sticking out of a local pastry shop, cake and blood smeared together all over the sidewalk. Not far back the way Mulder and Scully had just returned from, a classic Mustang convertible was neatly wrapped around a signpost, its read folded like an accordion from being mercilessly forced forward. The driver had been luckier than most, jumping out in time and only breaking his shin in the fall.

"They should make a law against those damn macho cars," the young officer muttered, his face contorted in discomfort. Something told them he had just come back from throwing up, or that he was going to in the near future. Mulder nodded silently, while Scully merely shrugged. Whoever had been going through L.A. like a bullet through butter had chosen the proper vehicle for the task, ripping some poor guy right out of his Hummer and just plowing through everyone. The owner was in the hospital now, some other agents hopefully getting a clear statement. He had been yanked so hard out of the car that his spine had dislocated, possibly putting him in a wheelchair for the nearest future.

"You know, I don't think they were meant to be driven exactly like..." Mulders voice trailed off as he spotted the agents that had been on the scene before him and Scully. Apparently, some locals had been dealing with a case of a completely different nature, and the agents on it had simply been moved to this one. Mulder had caught a scent of the case through channels of his own, and made sure they would get a chance to look at it before these people filed it away under some random act of violence.

"Agent Payne, agent Styles," he said shaking hands with the two young agents. He stopped, looking around for a third agent. "Where is your expert, agent Malik, was it?" The short one, who seemed to be chewing something, pointed over his shoulder at the last of the three, who was standing near the cake shop, just looking at it. Apparently, he was a profiler of sorts, although it seemed to Mulder that the profile for this case was not that complicated.

"Uhm, I'm guessing you'd like to talk statements, agent... Mulder?" said the taller one of the agents, a fairly big guy with slightly long hair. Of the two, he seemed vastly more likable, at least to Mulder. "Well, if you have anything good to add, that'd be nice," Mulder said, trying his best not to sound too old and stuffy. The tall agent, Styles, picked through some notes on his notepad. Very by the numbers, Scully would like him, too. Mulder looked over his shoulder to see what she was doing. For the moment, she seemed to be chatting with the young officer that brought her coffee, probably trying to make him either calm down, or, just as likely, make him buckle up and act his age.

"The victim, that would be the driver of the Hummer, described the perp as over six feet tall, extremely muscular, and... uhm..." The agent looked a bit awkward before continuing, "... well, nude." Stopping for a moment, he looked at Mulder, clearly expecting some kind of reaction. Mulder just noted down "naked" on his own notepad. "He also said that the perp had a kind of sickly look to him, almost a bit zombie-like. And that he had a faint red glow in his eyes."

There was a moment of uncomfortable silence, as agent Styles waited for Mulder to somehow respond. It seemed there was no more to add, and the guy just looked like a quiet question mark.

"I assume that seems a bit weird, right?" he asked, looking at Mulder. He chuckled a bit, continuing, "I mean what are we dealing with here, agent Mulder, a... some kind of zombie bodybuilder." He let out a nervous laugh. Mulder looked at the agent's partner, who was apparently done chewing on whatever he had been chewing on, and now just stood there, looking a bit... bitter, really. Maybe that was the one Scully could identify with more. He clearly did not seem amused by agent Styles' nervous jokings.

"What did they say?" Scully asked as Mulder returned. "Zombie bodybuilders," Mulder said with a grumpy tone. "Scully, did my reputation follow me here? I mean, that big one practically laughed in my face when he made that remark." Scully shook her head. "No, Mulder, I just think everybody is a bit on edge. I mean, according to officer Persson here," she nodded in the direction of the young police officer, "all of this came out of the blue. Whoever we're chasing covered several blocks in record time after apparently breaking through a concrete basement wall. I mean, even with drugs, this just..." She seemed very annoyed at what she was about to say. "This seems like one of your old supersoldier deals, but so much more violent."

Popping a sunflower seed in his mouth, Mulder did his absolute best not to smile.

Chapter 5

"Oh no, dear sweet baby..." Rose was rather startled at the words coming out of the Doctor's mouth as she stepped out of the TARDIS and saw him come running towards her. It took a few seconds for her to realize that he was talking about it, not her. She wanted to give a quick quip, seem smart in response at his emotional outburst, but something in her was actually a tiny, little bit sad that she felt so surprised at thinking anyone using those words to describe her. Which made her a bit mad at herself! It was a conflicting set of emotions, to say the least.

"Whatever you have been doing, Doctor, you must have been taking one hell of a beating while doing it. She... it had nearly torn through a forest just to brake properly, too!" she said, trying to ignore the flood of attention he was giving the big, blue box while apparently ignoring her. "Well, you need not thank me so overwhelmingly, Doctor, we are in public, after all," she said, her arms crossed and her lips pressed thin in a tense frown. He turned from the TARDIS for a moment, clearly having trouble keeping his attention on anything other than it, his eyes jumping back to it so obsessively she thought they might just pop out and stick to it.

"Rose, thank you so much for bringing her back. The poor baby has taken such a beating, haven't you?" he said, turning entirely back to the TARDIS as he mentioned it. Her. Whatever! Feeling a little less underappreciated, Rose handed him the key again. "What's with all the..." She hesitated, for a lack of words, and made a waving gesture with her hand at the TARDIS. "All the... inside?"

The door provided a bit of resistance as the Doctor went inside. He seemed to be well and on his feet again, though Rose noted that he gripped the various railings harder than usual, and he had a hard to place sway in his walk, like a sailor the first few moments on shore. He also twice nearly hit his head against the many modifications, which seemed a bit distracted even by his own standards.

"I had to have modifications done to her for the trip," the Doctor half shouted as he ducked and bent his way through the chaos of parts and wires. "It's really quite amazing, you know." Rose stood for a while, this time expecting him to suddenly remember that she did not know the full story and that he would, at some point, have to bring her up to the level of the conversation.

And then, silence. After several seconds of hearing no stream of words or outbursts from the Doctor, she started to fear he might have collapsed from his sudden excitement, or something even worse. The strong sense of leaking psychic energies was even worse than before, making her feel a bit on edge, as if she might start to cry for no apparent reason. The Doctor rarely reacted to anything with the same emotions as a human being, so she could only guess at what a sudden burst of the same energies would do to him, or make him do!

Walking carefully around all the new clutter, she found him standing on the level below, simply looking into the center of the TARDIS. He did not seem sad, but he was unusually quiet, which was a warning sign in and of itself. "Is it alright?" she asked at him, but for the first few moments, he made no indication that he even heard her. Then, with a soft "no", he walked forward, disappearing under the floor that she was standing on. Carefully, fearing the worst, Rose walked down the stairs to see what he had been looking at so mutely, but even when she spotted it, she didn't quite know what to make of it.

Pink and green mists were flowing out of the central pillar of the controls, the main link to the deep inner core of the TARDIS. They looked like escaping streams of gas, shimmering faintly in the air, except that the moved softly, as if they were limbs or even hair caught in a breeze. The Doctor was standing quite near them, his one hand held forward, as if to sense the colored streams.

"No, she is not alright. But at least, she is alive still," he said, in a low, concerned voice. "I thought we'd weathered the worst together when we got out of there, but the strain seems to have been too much." He paused, but Rose could hear that he had more to say. His voice dropped to half its strength. "I should never have had you pick her up," he mumbled, sounding very much like a man plagued by guilt.

Rose tried desperately to find something to say that could lighten the mood, raise his hopes somehow. "Can't you fix it?" she asked, "you still have your sonic..." She did not even finish the sentence before he held a brass cylinder out, his fingers tenderly holding onto it, as if it might shatter. "The first casualty in a long chain of events, I'm afraid." He muttered something very low, clearly meant for the TARDIS and not for Rose. It seemed odd, and yet not, but she had the very clear feeling that he was comforting it. The feeling of sadness and pain that flowed through the interior of the TARDIS diminished slightly, too, as if it understood that it was in safe hands now.

"I was looking for a present for a friend of mine, an old friend that I used to talk about time paradox and other such topics with," the Doctor said while holding his cup steady for Rose to pour tea into. "I wanted something a bit fancy, a bit futuristic, but not too much, so I just went a few years ahead of now." He sipped, leaning back in a way that looked a little less than comfortable for a man his height in the chair. "As I arrived, however, the TARDIS noted some oddities about the time. It seemed someone was altering it at the precise moment we arrived. That makes it a bit hard for the TARDIS to lock onto the point in time it is going for."

They had left the TARDIS outside, in the spot it had arrived in. The Doctor had assured her that it was, although badly damaged, not in dire peril. It simply had to repair a lot of damage. It seemed some of the many modifications were even meant to help it do just that, although he did not seem to have expected things to look as bad as they obviously did!

"So naturally, I looked into it. It could be a whole series of nasty things, after all, and we don't want unidentified nasties wriggling about in our little piece of space-time, now do we?" In his own, odd way, he seemed both chipper and bitterly serious at the same time. Rose had learned that this was a sign that he was either frustrated, angry or worried about whatever he was talking about, and she made sure to keep an eye out for clearer signals of what it was.

"Turns out it was quite a shady bit of timeline alterations, barely to be noted for a long time, but I caught up with it fully in 5137." His voice dropped as he spoke towards the end of the sentence. His arms fell down to his side, the cup now on the table, tea slowly going colder. As his words ran out, his eyes became distant. This was the point Rose hated in their adventures, the point where something had clearly happened of great importance, but it was on the level of time travel technicalties that she would be able to contribute with next to nothing. She wanted to say something comforting, but nothing came to mind.

"Is it something your friend can help you with?" she asked, shaking him out of his thoughts so abruptly that it even startled herself. "My friend?" he asked, looking at her. She nodded. "The friend you said you discussed these paradoxes with." Her words clearly confused him a bit, but his distracted mind soon caught up with it. "Oh, no, not paradox, it was no paraadox at all!" he reassured her. Which ironically made her worry a great deal more. "No, it was, it was something else. Something I had not quite expected."

Using the tea as an excuse, Rose got up. He was impossible in these situations, half lost in his own thoughts, and she had come to simply accept that. It still got to her, making her feel left out of his doings and goings like that, but still dragged into them, as well. Most of all, she was not up for just sitting there, debating a topic he did not feel like even explaining to her.

"Doctor, let me put this a bit bluntly," she said, loudly from the kitchen. She was being as quiet as she could in pouring out the tea, allowing herself an excuse for some distance from the man before he drove her around the bend entirely. "Tell me what you need to do to fix this, so I don't just wander about like some dim secretary of yours."

There was nothing but silence from the living room. Then, he finally spoke. "I need a psychic."

"What, like one of those phone ladies that tell you about how this week will be good for your work life but poor in romance? Because my mum has some magazines with those numbers on them, if you need it," she said in a slightly taunting tone as she reentered the room. She knew he meant somethng else, but she felt a bit like the mother of a young child, trying to teach it to state clearly what it wanted, if it really wanted it.

"No," he replied, in a tone of voice that indicated he knew she was pulling him on, "I need someone who can make a scan of the overall globe for certain mental signatures. Someone who reads minds, but a lot of them, and at a grat distance." Rose plunked down on the couch in her best let's-talk-serious fashion. The Doctor was catching on and being clear and concise about his needs. Good boy! She almost felt like getting him a small treat or something, or at least a pat on the head.

"I thought the TARDIS could do a scan like that easy," she half stated, half asked him. He took a sip of tea, frowning that it had turned a bit cold in his mental absence, then shook his head. "The TARDIS needs to be alone. It needs to heal, or it will..." He turned quiet, clearly not liking where that sentence was going. "I need something else." Rose sat for a second, thinking. "Maybe not something else,"she said, "maybe someone." The Doctor looked at her. "Someone? Do you know a verified psychic of such power here in London, by any chance?" Rose shook her head. "No, but I do remember you mentioning a powerful psychic in New York once!" The Doctor smiled, the kind of smile that was nearly a smirk, just arrogant enough to annoy but still kind enough to keep one pretending not to be annoyed. "Dear Rose, the TARDIS is going nowhere. We are stuck with what we can find locally." For once, Rose was now the one putting on a patronizing face and tone. "Doctor," she said, "there are other ways to travel than the TARDIS."

The Doctor's eyes widened. "No." Feeling a bit sadistic, Rose simply continued to taste her tea, leaning back as far as the couch would let her. "No, Rose, no, no, no, no." Rose just smiled.

Chapter 6

The car was bitterly silent. Not even a tape was playing. The three occupants sat in complete silence. Every time Sam or Castiel tried to say anything, Dean made an angry gesture, and everyone knew to shut up. It was every bad family road trip, all over again.

Morning had broken long enough ago that sunlight now lit their way, and as Dean turned the lights off, Sam finally broke the silence, hoping his hands were preoccupied enough to stop him making angry gestures again.

"You're being silly, Dean," he said in his best therapist tone of voice. "You let me..." "I let you what, Sam? I let you what, exactly? Huh?"

In the back, Castiel was watching the two closely. He knew full well not to intervene in family disputes, but he was also a bit fascinated by them. People who cared about each other, arguing with intense anger and putting little restraint on their words. It was a puzzling concept.

The car fell silent for a few minutes again, before Dean finally broke the silence. "One Direction, Sam. One... Direction!". Sam turned on his cellphone again, opening the navigation app. Without letting his eyes off the road, Dean slapped the phone out of his hand. "You know perfectly well that is not what I mean, Sam."

"It was a joke, Dean," Sam said, making sure to catch the phone before it tumbled to the floor. "Besides, those old bands will get people wondering at some point. We need to shake things up a bit now and then." Dean gave him a downright evil glance, making Sam subconsciously slide a bit farther away from him in the car seat.

"Which direction is your brother so upset about, Sam?" asked Castiel calmly from the back. He really had no need to take the car with the brothers, but it felt nice. It felt like he was making a very special connection with them. It felt very... human.

"It's not an actual direction, Cass, it's a band. It's just the names of people in a band." He had to raise his voice to distract the angel from Dean's incessant grumbling. "But we are going in the right direction, are we not?" the angel continued, less able to ignore Dean's low cursing and complaining than Sam was. Sam nodded. "Yes, we are going east by northeast, which is what that agent Mulder guy said the perp was going."

Cass smiled, leaning back in the seat. "The right direction, very good," he said, trying to bring some cheer back to the group. "The right direction. The one direction, you might even say!" The next few seconds confused Cass greatly, as Sam laughed openly at his remark, while Dean's outburst was fairly blasphemous, followed by very loud music from his childhood being started from the car stereo.

Stepping into the diner was like stepping into what someone who had never seen a Clint Eastwood western might well think was a Clint Eastwood western. Sombreros on the walls, ponchos on the side of the stairs, painted deserts and all the trimmings of a theme restaurant, without all that fancy accuracy or detail. Understanding that he might have crossed the line back in L.A. on the matter of agent names, Sam sat down silently as Dean ordered what was no doubt the greasiest thing he could find on the menu, with some added punishment for Sam's acceptance of modern pop culture into their lives.

"So, Cass, are we talking angel here? Maybe some pissed off lesser soldier of Heaven, or a fallen one?" Cass was not ignoring Sam's question, the decorations were simply distracting him. "Sam, is it wise to have weapons on the walls of a public place?" he asked, causing Sam to, again, put on his therapist tone. "They are fake, they're just decorations. Now, angel or no angel?"

Castiel looked at him, thinking about any angel he could recall. "No, something does not match at all. Why would an angel with such strength need a car, and why would it be going to Las Vegas?"

"The free drinks at the Bellagio, maybe?" Dean sat down, holding a handful of giant french fries, the well-advertised house special. "Maybe Birdboy lost his wings and needed some other means of transportation. Or maybe all that muscle they kept talking about weighed him down too much to fly."

"Dean, angels do not really fly, like big birds," Cass said dryly, his mind still flipping through any possibilities he could come up with. "It's not from Heaven, but it might be from Hell," he finally said, looking at the two brothers for some kind of feedback.

In a fluent motion that was at this point practised to perfection, Sam pulled up his laptop and opened it on the diner table. He proceeded to ignore Dean's silent handwaving about the room on the table it took up, which, to his brother, was the sacred space for food. The device booted up in a few seconds, opening directly on a set of hunter-maintained search engines. Every time it did that, Sam wondered if it was about time to use the computer for something else, perhaps even just a game of solitaire.

"Well, there was the part about red glow from the eyes, that does sound a bit demonic," he added to the conversation while inputting the few specific details they had managed to find. "And it did break out of a basement, although that seems almost more symbolic than anything else."

His fingers moved swiftly over the keyboard, entering clue after clue from his notepad. "Also, did any of you get a weird vibe from that agent, Mulder? He seemed way too calm about the weirdness of it all." Dean suddenly waved his fingers at Sam to signal agreement. The fries had been rather salty, it seemed, although his attention to his beer was not all that unusual. "Yeah, like he'd seen this kind of crap before, right?" Sam nodded. "Do we actually have hunter FBI agents? As in, real agents, with real, authentic badges?"

"Too many philosophical implications for me, man," Dean finally said after the two had let the idea run through their heads. "Also," Sam immediately followed, "his partner seemed way too real to be anything but a purebreed agent." Dean looked at him with questions in his eyes, so Sam elaborated. "The redhead, the woman talking to the police officer not more than ten feet away?" Dean nodded, grinning wide. "Yeah, redhead." Sam just laughed under his breath and turned his attention back to the laptop. "You notice a redheaded woman, but not that she was a field FBI agent," he mumbled, just loud enough for Dean to hear. "Plus, dude, she was old enough to be your mom." Dean just kept smiling. "Yeah, cougar action."

As the waitress came over with their food, Dean immediately leaned back and helped the plates to the table. Castiel, still not feeling entirely certain around human eating rituals, followed suit as best as he could. Sam, on the other hand, was suddenly too preoccupied with the screen to even register it, making odd little reaction noises while sitting with his maw half open.

"Sammy?" Dean said in a firm voice. "Sam, respect the food, pay attention."

"Didn't they describe the perp as a big, unnaturally muscular guy with something funky about his eyes?" Both Dean and Castiel perked up at his question. "Yeah, why, you found our monster of the day or something?" Sam turned the laptop around on the table, nearly pushing his own Big Bandit Burger over the small table's edge. "Well, what if that was an actual, literal description?"

Dean and Castiel leaned in to look closer at the old photos on Sam's laptop screen. They showed a very big man in dark sunglasses, a man built like someone had started adding his muscles and then forgotten to stop. "Who is that? He looks... big," was Castiel's only comment. Dean still seemed to try and get his head around the muscle mass of the person, or whatever it was, in the photos.

"That, ladies and gentlemen, is a a picture taken at an L.A. police station in 1984. And this," he said, clicking a button to make one of the other photos jump to the front, "is one taken in 1991 by a security camera at a mall, also in L.A."

Dean, clearly torn between Sam's discovery and the arrival of the food, looked at his brother with a bit of uncertainty. "So you found a steroid giant in Los Angeles who doesn't seem to age much, what of it?". The question asked, he returned his attention to the burger, which seemed to Castiel to be designed specifically to absorb and hold as much cooking grease as physically possible for meat.

"Not just that, but all the surrounding accounts seem to match up. A whole lot of destruction, witnesses seeing a big nude man stealing someone's clothes, even a report of someone seeing the same big man with at least one glowing red eye." Sam finally realized the presence of his burger, confirming that Dean had ordered him the nastiest, spiciest thing that was borderline legal to produce in a kitchen.

"So, what is he?" asked Castiel, making sure to eat the oversized french fries that came with his meal. At that question, Sam seemed to loose his steam a bit. "No idea. There are no signs in reports of anything demonic, and I have no idea where to go in the lore."

"And then there's that whole Vegas thing," Dean added, somehow alrady halfway through his monster of a meal. "First off, if you want to go to Vegas, go to Vegas. It's not rocket science, and you don't need to tear L.A. apart for it."

Sam shut the laptop, finally acknowledging that he would need to bite into the abomination of a burger set before him if he wanted to regain his brother's respect after the whole One Direction affair. "I guess we're going to Vegas to find ourselves a big muscle man." It took about four seconds before the phrasing of that made Dean visibly incomfortable.

Chapter 7

The sound of hundreds of people filled the entire building with a buzz of life. Life without a common rythm or cause, life that just mashed together until it was an unrecognizable blur. From the walkway above the main area, it seemed a bit less daunting, but the whole station had an uncanny athmosphere.

"Come on, Doctor, it's not that bad, there's nothing to be afraid of," said Rose in a motherly tone. The Doctor stood leaning against the rail on the walkway, peering out over the writhing masses below as if he might start yelling obscenities at them with a moment's notice. At first, it had been a bit unnerving to see, his usual travel spirit suddenly gone, to be replaced with the moodswings of a child that needed its afternoon nap.

"I know there is nothing to fear," he said in a somewhat spiteful tone, "but there are plenty of things to dispise." His continued gaze back and forth over the crowd had Rose a bit worried, but she was fairly sure he was not about to do anything completely bonkers. If nothing else, his sulking meant that his energy level was lower than usual, reducing the risk of unpredictable spontaneous... actions.

"You go hopping around the universe in the TARDIS all the time, why is a train such a horrible thing to you?" The big challenge for her was to balance her voice between being firm with him and enjoying the situation a bit too much. He looked away from the crowd to meet her eyes, and she decided to hide her smile a bit more. She really was not trying to gloat, but it was rare for her to have the upper hand when it came to travel,

"The TARDIS is a living being, full of room to breathe, and most certainly not full of dozens of complete strangers locked in a cramped space together under the control of British Rail," he muttered. His eyes gazing at the crowd were not entirely negative, however. He liked humanity, of course, but clearly, being stuck inside a box for extended periods of time with it was not quite his idea of fun.

As his nerves calmed, the Doctor finally started to become more mobile. At first, he began to pace the walkway, like a cat not wanting to come down from a roof. The moment they had entered the station, he had immediately sought a way up there, getting out of the crowd to watch it all a bit from afar. After a few minutes of pacing, however, he finally loosened up, rolling his shoulders and adjusting the collar of his jacket as if he was about to pick a fight with some 50s gangster.

"I was wondering," said Rose as they began to make their way to their track, "why do you only carry a single sonic screwdriver with you, when you have so much difficulty managing without it if it breaks?"

At her question, the Doctor pulled out the brass cylinder that held the broken sonic screwdriver. He slowed down to half his pace as he held it in front of his face, looking at it with a hint of longing in his eyes. It was quite clear to her that it was not only a practical inconvenience for him to not be able to wield the screwdriver. It was just as much an emotional burden.

"Whenever I regenerate, something deep inside changes," he said, his voice making him sound as if he was talking about some distant memory. Considering his many regenerations up to that point, it might in fact be a series of distant memories.

"In some ways, I remain me, I remain the Doctor, but in some other ways, a part of me dies away to make room for something new, hopefully something improved, something stronger, better." He held the brass cylinder up by the tips of his fingers, waving it gently like a conductor would his staff at an orchestra. "This follows suit. It is made for me, and for me only. I need to change it, to make it mine and mine alone." He had stopped walking, his thoughts about the sonic screwdriver distracting him from his walk. Or perhaps he was simply afraid to drop the cylinder if he kept on walking. The way he held it was almost tender, almost compassionate. As he balanced it carefully on his fingertips, Rose was feeling almost mesmerized by the shine of the simple, blank surface of it. "This, Rose Tyler, is my own personal magic wand, created specifically for my needs, tailored to my person in both body and mind. It cannot be easily copied, or at the very least, not more easily than you or I could be copied." A slight shift in the pressure of his fingers against the brass, and the cylinder slid into his palm, which then hid it inside his jacket.

"So what do you do now that it's broken? Where do you get it fixed?" added Rose, her mind slowly moving beyond the Doctor's very emotional description of what she tended to see as just a very clever tool. The Doctor sighed, his voice no longer the same playful, artistic tone of before.

"That is an entirely other matter. Let's shove ourselves inside a tin can with a hundred other people and fling ourselves around the city, shall we?"

Paddington Station was its usual lively self, people practically walking on each other to get to and from there respective trains, taxi cabs, private rocketships and camels. The two last ones might have been just Rose's mind trying to amuse itself with idle silliness, but she needed it.

The Doctor had been like a small child throughout the relatively brief ride from King's Cross to Paddington, never sitting still and persistently talking to other passengers, often loudly so. While he never swayed from his overall friendly nature towards strangers, it was not the London way to engage that enthusiastically with unfamiliar people, and Rose had felt like a single mother most of the way.

Now, free of the restraining walls of the train, he had turned a bit more endurable. Walking from spot to spot, gawking at the large signs and shops placed around the station, he at least did nothing to stir unrest. The passengers on their train had been very overbearing, at least after Rose made indicating gestures behind the Doctor's back to convince them that he was a less capable person in her care. She wondered if he had even noted her emergency lie to them, when she spoke to him as one would speak to a mentally handicapped person or a very small child. If he had noticed, he had never given her a signal of it.

"It sort of boggles the mind, doesn't it, Rose?" he asked fairly loud, choosing to drown out the surrounding noise rather than take a moment to step closer to her. She stopped, almost causing an elderly business man to bump right into her, and looked in his direction without a word. "I mean, I have gone through every part of the known universe without ever really mingling with people going other ways, and here we are, two parts of one big, writhing mass of soggy clay that is the travelling public. Marvelous, how you all seem to adapt to your complete lack of individual destinies and simply merge into one organism, thoughts and minds freely letting themselves..." He realized that Rose had gone on without him.

"Are we late?" he asked, picking up his pace to reach her side as she briskly strolled to their assigned platform. She shook her head. "No, we're making fine time, why do you ask?" The tall man shrugged, his eyes still twisting themselves into almost a knot, trying to take in it all. "Nothing, really," he replied, doing his best to asume a cooler, calmer voice. It was clear that his childlike wonder and high-spirited philosophies were not finding a proper audience at this moment! "But you do know, that I typically have my travel methods ready at hand, right? The TARDIS waits for me, and rarely the other way around. So this is, well, sort of alien to me." Rose concealed a smile. The time traveller from a distant planet, calling a train ride alien? The world never ceased to amaze.

"Exactly when will the TARDIS be ready to make your travel plans that much easier, Doctor?" she said in a low, slightly strained voice, "because I am not sure this mode of travel is something I can handle on a day-to-day basis." "I know," the Doctor said, almost cutting her words off in his eagerness to respond, "it does wear on the nerves a bit, the constant checking of time tables, shuffling from tin box to tin box." Rose decided not to add any remarks on the exact parts of the journey that were getting on her nerves, satisfied to simply let the Doctor make his own assumptions. "But I gather, a few days," he explained, while counting on his fingers and mumbling words she either heard wrong or could not translate. "The core is still intact, most of the damage is centered on..." Without warning, the Doctor suddenly stopped his explaining and locked steps with Rose completely, walking at her side in the stiffest, most unnatural way possible for him. Especially considering the difference in their length of stride. "A ginger," he said, looking almost in a panic.

"It damaged a ginger? In the TARDIS? What were you doing with a..." He shook his head rather forcefully to cut her off, then held a balled fist close to his chest. Making a nudge with his head that was far less discrete than he clearly thought, he pointed a thumb backward, hand still close to his chest. Rose was about to turn her head to look, when the Doctor elbowed her arm in a quick motion, shaking his index finger at her.

"Doctor, you're scaring me. What is it about you and gingers, anyway?" She barely finished the sentence before he pointed, still with the hand pressed closely to his chest, at a pane of glass in a small control booth. Rose looked at the pane as intensely as she could, but had to accept that whatever the Doctor could see in it, it required his height to do so.

"Gingers... are... just... people, Doctor," she snarled at him.

"Not... this... one, Rose," he whispered back.

Chapter 8

Las Vegas was starting to smell. It did that, in the morning, if you did not manage to keep near the finer establishments. This was not one of the finer establishment. Essentially, it was not an establishment at all, as the two figures were standing outside the small bar, in the less proper part of the already less than proper City of Lights. Although neither knew it about the other, both of the figures prefered the city's other nickname, Sin City.

"Look, William, this is pretty simple. I can still find that old contract for your soul, and the rules down below have changed with the new management, get it?" said the bigger of the two. He was not big in general, but his conversational partner, William, was a fairly light build. He actually liked that. It kept people underestimating him.

"Look, Fergus," said the other one, forcing as much disdain into the name as he possibly could, "I have managed quite nicely both with and without that thing, so you'll have to play a harder game than that, mate." The last word, like the name, was given a sarcastic amount of enunciation, making it clearly not well meant.

The slightly bigger one, Fergus, had close to fire and brimstone seeping out his eyes at William. He turned, a bit frustrated at the lack of progress he was making. He had other minions in the area, why not use them? He shook his head. No, this one required an outsider, someone thinking outside the box. Minions were great at tossing a few hired goons about, but they were muscle, not brains. Beside, those two halfwits already knew his M.O., they would take more to screw around with, even if just for a little while. Fergus needed... he shook his head at that name... Crowley needed something new, something fresh.

"Fine, what was it you wanted, a mountain of material wealth and all that? Is that the direction we're going in, you little upstart?" He nearly hissed at the vampire. Some of it was for show, but as much of it was actual disdain. These bloodsuckers were a nightmare to deal with, and about as reliable as trying to bribe dice. Crowley prefered his dice loaded and compliant. Surprises were more fun when it was you springing them on others.

"For that little trick, yeah." The vampire stood for a moment, gloating in the small victory, before adding "mate" to his reply. There was a great deal of satisfaction in seeing the Substitute King of Hell have to haggle with a lesser being. He knew Crowley could end him as a smear on the alley walls, but if he was taking orders, he was damned well also taking a paycheck.

"You do know I can end you as a smear on these sad alley walls, right, mate?" said Crowley, his voice now again cool and aloof. This waas dangerous. If the little runt showed more of a spine, Crowley might end up liking him, standing there like some dated Billy Idol lookalike. Or he could simply rip the spine out. That did seem like an appealing conclusion to their little tete-a-tete. The bloodsucker just smiled. Crowley almost expected him to show his fangs and make a move, arrogant little prick.

The two parted, nothing but mutual love and admiration in their hearts. That, and the itching to rip the other's head off, but sincerity was the first thing you had to learn to lie about. Silently checking up on his more obedient soldiers on the outskirts of town, Crowley made sure the Winchester kiddies had yet to reach the city limits, then he turned to the vampire, who was currently dancing to some music that was clearly playing at poor quality in that messy little mind of his.

"And you got the whole step-by-step of what I want from you, didn't you, William?" The vampire stopped, making a bored gesture with his entire body, the scrawny-looking shoulders slumping back and hands slightly away from the body. Crowley would have enjoyed the ironic similarity to prayer much better if he hadn't thought it was completely deliberate by the guy.

"I get in the lovey-doveys with your two slayer boyfriends, show them the sights for a few hours while you fuddle about doing your thing. It's not rocket surgery, Fergus," he said, without even turning around to look at the man standing in the alley. "Hunters," Crowley responded. The vampir finally turned around. "Liven up, Fergie, it's just words," he said playfully, winking at the King of Hell like a schoolyard buddy. He then spun on one heel, making a cheerful little sound, and huried out before the sun's rays took back the strets in full force.

"Because," mumbled Crowley to nobody but himself, "it's called a hunter while it hunts you." The sounds of Hell filled his ears as he stepped out of the earthly realm. "It's only called a slayer when it slays you, and then you already lost." Las Vegas dissolved around him, and he was back in Hell. A lesser servant of some unimportant sort handed him a fresh drink. "Mate."

Sunlight was starting to conquer the city more and more as the morning progressed. Even though he was no longer stuck in that foul alley with the arrogant scotsman, and even though he was well within the shade, the morning light bothered Spike to no end. "Jump, little fella, jump for your almighty king," he snarled at nobody in particular, watching the tourists stumble around drunkenly, no doubt returning from something they would come to regret. A fight, a prostitute. A wedding, maybe their own. Humans were a sad bunch, or maybe that was just the effects of the city.

An Impala. Spike hadn't seen one of those in some time. Classy ride. He could almost sympathize with these two slayers, or hunters, or gatherers of pretty flowers, or whatever they were called these days. He had been sitting around for close to an hour, and was starting to get a bit miffed at playing errandboy, but it was an easy thing to do, and having the almighty King of Hell owe him a small favor might come in pretty handy. Just a thought.

"Well spank my bottom pink and call me Suzie," he muttered with a smile as he stood up, realizing that he might have muttered it a bit too loud when a passing tourist looked at him in a slightly astounded manner. "No mate, you'll want the ones over there," he quipped at the man, then pointed away at nothing in particular.

The Impala was rolling through the street at a peculiarly low speed, almost like a police car patrolling the area. Cautious little critters, he thought, having almost expected rocket-wielding ninjas to leap from it, considering how important it had seemed to his new friend. Part of him was almost sad, he could do with a good fight. Of course, he could always pick one with them, should he bore of them.

The casinos were starting to blend together, one ungodly display of colored lightbulbs seeming much like another. The street seemed to show no signs of devastation, but as Sam had remarked, half the city looked like someone had thrown Baby Liberace's building blocks together at random and put a sign on it, anyway. At a distance, it was hard to know if it was devastation or just excessively creative gambling joints they were looking at.

"Soooo," said Sam, rubbing his face, still a bit tired. It had been very early in the morning back in L.A., and neither one of them had gotten that much sleep at their motel, a place that seemed frequented by ladies of the night. Loud ones, too! He had slipped in a few minutes of sleep in the car, but still. "Do we go by bloodcurdling screams, or do we hope Vegas PD is as spectacular as their casinos and easy to spot?"

Dean wasn't responding. Cass had ducked out a little while back, while Sam was napping, no doubt getting restless. He had claimed that he would go talk to a contact, but at times, the difference between travelling with an angel and travelling with an impatient teenager was hard to distinguish. He might already be in Vegas, but Dean was determined to complete the drive without using angel wings for speed.

Part of him had argued against it. Whatever was on the loose was a threat to everyone around it. And unless Bigfoot had recently gotten his license, it was not just some mindless beast. But that was part of the point. Whatever it was, it had torn through everything in L.A., but nothing along the highway after that. No driver just turned law-abiding after that mess, and he had expected something, anything, along the way to clue them in on what was going on.

What was clear was that they were running behind this thing. Their little breakfast stop had probably done nothing to close the gap between them, but if this citywrecker had suddenly calmed down and tried to blend in, they had no choice but to hope for some additional destruction to even know which way it was going.

"I'm not kidding, Dean. If we don't find a..." There was a loud slam, and Dean floored the brakes. The two sat for a few seconds, motionless, holding their breath. "Dean, did we just..." Dean just made a weird sound, like he was choking on something, his hands still clenched around the steering wheel.

Jumping out of the car, both of them hurried to the front of it. On the road, a man was writhing on the ground, making clear sounds of agony. He was dressed mostly in dark leather, his white hair sticking out like the flame on a match. As he hurried over to the man, Sam noticed Dean hesitating, first stopping a second to glance over the Impala's front.

"Hey, you alright? Can you hear me?" Kneeling down near the man's head, Sam put his hand gently on the man's shoulder and gave it a shake. The guy waved Sam's hand away with a grunt.

"Watch the leather, mate," he complained as he started to breathe deeply, and loudly. Sam looked up at the still uneasy Dean, who seemed a bit at a loss for what to do. He finally pulled out his phone and called for an ambulance.

"No, no, no, leave the city's finest out of this one, I'll manage. Get a hand?" Sam grabbed the man's hand as it reached up from the road, lifting him to his legs with utmost care. "What were you going, anyway, negative ten?" the man asked, brushing himself off. "I damn well thought you were parking, not doing a slow-motion schtick in the middle of the street." The leather jacket flapped about him for a few seconds before finding its right fit after being tossed around, but the man seemed largely unscathed. As he tried to walk, though, he gave signs of pain, and sat down on the curb, rubbing his left ankle.

"Look, you sure you're all okay, man? Looked like you took..." The man waved reassuringly at Sam again, nodding as he did. Looking again at his brother, he noted Dean having a far too relaxed smile on him. The two made silent gestures back and forth, Dean clearly wanting to know if there was anything to actually do. He had a right to get impatient, but Sam was still not sure about the stranger's condition.

"Oh, hey, is that an Impala?" asked the man all of a sudden. Dean and Sam both looked a bit surprised at the man, then the car, then the man again. As if his ankle had magically healed itself, the guy stood up quick and started to walk across the front of the car, looking at it with intense delight. "You never see those in these parts anymore. Man, they don't make them like that these days, do they?"

Dean smiled at the interest in his car, while Sam still stood on the sidewalk with a confused look on his face. From injured to walking, the stranger seemed to have completely forgotten being hit. "Yeah, it's... it's a nice car. Are you..." This time, Dean waved the hand at Sam. It was unclear whether his grin was at the sudden resolution of their accident, or because of the stranger's fascination.

"Put her back together a few times myself. She's my little baby, that's what she is," he said, loud and proud, like a father talking about his daughter shining in a school play. "Original seats?" asked the stranger, still showing no signs of the former injury. Dean shook his head and was about to start explaining something, when Sam interrupted. "Dean, shouldn't we... you know...?"

The stranger looked up at the two, and Sam could have sworn he suddenly got a bit of a limp back in the leg whose foot he had just been rubbing. "Oh, sorry, I didn't realize you were in a hurry, you know, with the driving miss Daisy speed. Tourists?"

Sam and Dean let out a low laugh almost simultaneously. "No," Sam answered, "no, we're here on business." Dean suddenly jumped in, pointing his thinking finger as he did. "Say, you haven't by any chance seen a Hummer tear through here an hour or so ago, have you?"

The stranger thought hard about it, then shook his head. "No, I haven't," he started, pausing a second before finishing the sentence. "But you should probably talk to the security staff at one of the casinos, right?"

Looking at each other for a moment, the two Winchesters shrugged and nodded at the idea. As they turned to get back in the car, Sam still with a worrying look at the stranger, the man added, "actually, if you could help me to that casino right over there," he said, pointing to one of the less gaudy ones nearby, "I'd be very happy. My mate works there, he can help me from there on, and the little watchdogs can probably help you."

They took a look at the building. "Hart". Sounded like a good place to start.

Chapter 9

Heathrow was the usual mix of bored people waiting and stressed people running. The Doctor's psychic paper had been an excellemt stand-in for a passport, and for whatever reason, nothing in his jacket had caused issues in the checkpoints. Even the Doctor himself seemed to have, for a time, accepted his fate to travel in basic human vehicles.

The ginger still loomed, though.

Using every visible reflective surface, and her pocket mirror, Rose had spent a good part of the wait trying to find the illusive redhead that had the Doctor so worried. Finally, she caught a definite glimpse of a redhead, that the Doctor could confirm was the one apparently stalking them. He looked in his mid-twenties, slightly awkward and all in all very unthreatening. "That's what's so dangerous," the Doctor had responded at the time. Rose had chosen, probably wisely so, not to ask him what that was supposed to mean.

On the plane, the Doctor's restless unease quickly began to show again. At first, he simply seemed a bit excited, maybe impatient about the plane boarding, but even as they taxied unto the runway, his legs started getting a bit too active and he couldn't stay in his seat. The staff had to sit him down twice, and ended up physically making sure his safety belt was locked and tightened.

It wasn't that he was nervous about flying. They had already discussed that at the airport. He had his reservations about humanity's willingness to carelessly hurl metal boxes over the Atlantic, refusing any similarity to the TARDIS on the basis that there was no down for it to fall, should something break along the trip. Its current condition, having actually just crashed and all, was staunchly defended as a freak occurence, once in several millenia.

And now they were sitting in the metal box, being hurled across the Atlantic. Rose was spending her time flipping through one of the glossy magazines, while the Doctor was pressing every button available on or near the screen in the back of the seat in front of him, at times hard enough that whoever sat in the seat could be heard grumbling.

"You need new movies," he said quite casually, almost as if he had done the research and was simply passing on the interesting conclusion. Rose simply replied with a "hm hm," hoping not to give him cause for a major debate on the topic. When he finally gave up on the screen and took out the small brass cylinder holding his broken sonic screwdriver, Rose flinched quite visibly and told him to put it away. He clearly did not understand her worries, but did as she said.

Then, he unbuckled and got up. Before she could protest at whatever he had in mind to do, just out of the principle of it, he was already wandering down the aisle. When she heard him ask a random passenger if there was a ginger aboard, she nearly ripped the safety belt off, before she hurried after him.

"He's about this tall, looks very uncomfortable and sulky, and he..."

"I'm sorry, he mistook you for someone else," Rose said with a smile at the passenger, dragging the Doctor away with a firm hand.

"Oh, I see him now, thank you very much, Rose!" The Doctor took the aisle in long, energetic strides, Rose close to jogging just to keep up. Even at a distance, she saw the expression of utter panic on the face of the redhaired young man sitting several seats behind theirs on the big plane.

"Doctor, you can not simply..." She never had time to finish the sentence, as the Doctor had already reached his target.

"Hello," he said with a grin. Rose half expected him to do his usual "I'm the Doctor" introduction, but he never followed up on the greeting. The young man was clearly holding back a panic attack, breathing fast and looking desperately for help or a quick exit.

"Well," the Doctor finally continued, "here I am. And this, by the way, is Rose," he said cheerfully, putting his arm behind Rose and presenting her to whoever this poor fellow was.

"Sir, you're disturbing the other passengers. I'll have to ask you to find your seat again." The stewardess that had turned up quite quickly was now giving the Doctor a polite, but very telling smile. Rose suddenly sympathized with the young, redhaired man in the seat, feeling like she might go into a panic at any moment. Images of being transported off the plane in handcuffs at the airport in New York kept popping up inside of her mind.

"No, it's, it's okay, he's with me," said the man. Rose forgot all her premonitions of a future in American prisons and simply looked at him, completely surprised. The Doctor seemed less astounded, simply smiling his usual smile at the stewardess until she backed away.

"So, my new friend, what makes you tag along with us so shyly, if you don't mind my asking?" the Doctor asked in a chummy voice. The man as about to speak when the stewardess suddenly appeared again, this time with two men at her side, one of them in a uniform like her. The other one had a suit on. Rose did not feel that he was a business man, or just a snappy dresser.

"Sir, I'll have to ask you to..." The Doctor cut her off by flipping out the psychic paper and showing it to her in one quick motion, making the uniformed man instinctively back away and duck slightly, and sending the suited man reaching for something inside his suit. Luckily for all, he never finished the move.

"Right, sir. But I'll still have to ask you to keep it down, so as to not bother the other passengers," said the stewardess. As they left quietly, Rose sent the Doctor a questioning glance. "U.S. Marshall. I guess I look the type," he said with a smile.

"Seriously, don't do that," said the young man, startling the two. The Doctor looked first at the psychic paper, then Rose, then back at the man. "Do what?" he asked, in an honestly surprised voice.

The man nudged the two and got out of his seat, looking nervously down both directions of the aisle before gesturing them to follow him. Reaching one of the middle exits of the plane, where they were not immediately surrounded by other passengers, he leaned in closely to the Doctor, causing Rose to lean in, as well.

"You can not just wave those things around like that, people will notice and you'll cause problems," said the man, clearly expecting the Doctor and Rose to understand what he was going on about. "I saw you all the way back at the train station, waving the wand around. I don't know who you are, but you'll need to cut that out before you attract attention for it."

There was a silence between the three, as both the Doctor and Rose tried to digest what he was saying.

"Wand?" asked the Doctor, clearly believing this to somehow be a joke, of the less impressive variety. The man simply nodded. Rose looked at the Doctor, then at his jacket.

"Doctor, didn't you call..." She hesitated, then pointed at his jacket. "Didn't you call it a magic wand back at King's Cross?"

The Doctor reached in and pulled out the brass cylinder containing the sonic screwdriver, causing the young man to have yet another minor fit, looking terrified around for anyone that might be observing them at that moment.

"Are you completely barmy, put that aw..." He stopped, mid-word, and looked at the cylinder. "That's an odd one. Where'd you buy that one?" Suddenly less worried and a lot more confused, he was pointing at the cylinder, almost poking it with his index finger. "Is it even a wand?" he asked, voice full of disbelief.

"Don't you feel foolish now," Rose muttered with a relieved smile on her face. She then thought fof something. "Wait, do you mean to tell us that you followed us, all the way from King's Cross, because he called that thing a magic wand?" She looked at the man with stern eyes, folding her arms over her chest like a schoolteacher ready to dispense hard but fair discipline.

"Of course not," the man responded, "it just got my attention, like it might get the attention of any wizard with half an ear and one quarter of a mind to spare." He reached into the pocket iside his own jacket and pulled out a small stone, displaying it to the two with a look of "gotcha" on his face. The Doctor and Rose simply watched the stone, expecting it to start singing and dancing or something equally exciting. Nothing happened.

"You," the man pointed at the Doctor, "reek of weird magics. The moment I spotted you, waving that brass wand about, I had the spell cast. I don't know what you're up to, but I now Aurors personally, who..." He stopped talking. The Doctor was smiling wide and had turned to gently poking the man with his finger, as if he expected him to be a hologram or pop like a balloon.

"Stop that," the man said, quite annoyed. The Doctor promtly stopped poking, but not smiling.

"Did you hear him, Rose?" he asked, never turning to look at her or wait for a response, "he distinctly said wizards. And spell! He talked about casting spells, isn't that marvelous?!"

Rose looked the man over. He looked nothing out of the ordinary, in fact he could have just stepped out of any office job in any part of London. His accent was clearly British, and not very posh. A typical working class englishman, she would have guessed at a glance. Not one to talk about sorcery and spells, not even if he was just a crazy person.

"So I'm guessing you have your wand somewhere safe, then," she asked, hoping he would not be quick to realize that neither she nor the Doctor had no idea what he was talking about. The Doctor's continued fascination with the man made her worry that might be too late, but after looking carefully down both paths of the aisle, the man nervously opened his jacket a bit, showing what looked like the small branch from a typical elm.

"Well, I guess it's..." Rose had a lot of experience trying to find positive things to say when guys tried to impress her, but she was coming up a bit short in this case. "It's a nice... stick. Right, Doctor?" She looked up at the Doctor, startled to find him giving the stick a very serious eye.

"What can that thing do?" he asked.

Chapter 10

She stayed in the shadows. The late morning sun was already bathing everything in light, but from her rooftop hiding spot, she had a perfect view of the carnage below. The ventilation unit cooling the entire building hummed with an annoying, monotone sound, probably suggesting it needed repairs, but it shaded her just right, as she leaned over the edge, watching the humans below.

It was the blood that had attracted her. She had her thirst under control, but the smell of it was still powerful. And there was a lot of it. It had taken her a bit to get used to the odd odor of sugar and blood mashed together, though, making her feel like someone who had been feeding on a diabetic. She knew the spot. She liked that cake shop. It used pretty colors. Now, it was far below her, only the shards of glass and a bit of the car buried in it visible from her point of view.

Mostly, though, her eyes followed the FBI agents. She knew them, even if only by name and gossip. That gossip tended to often have the fabled Purge involved, and she had a suspicion that there was a deeper connection than simply spooky tales told from one vampire to another. She could kill them now, all of them, the FBI agents included. Spooky. That was his nickname, or so the gossip went. Spooky Mulder. He seemed harmless enough, at least from afar. None of her vampire connections had yet given any hint why he was supposed to be so spooky, if he had a talent or powers that went unseen. He seemed like just another ordinary human.

"Who are you?" she mumbled to herself, looking at the spot where the local police was taking samples of damn near everything. They would never find anything of value, she told herself. They did so much work for no other reason than to convince themselves there might be some gain from it. But there wasn't. They worked in vain, just to convince themselvess it wasn't in vain, that they had a measure of control.

"Tell me why I don't kill you right here and now, Selene," said a voice behind her. She had let her guard down. Again. The humans were becoming a dangerous fascination of hers, enough that she forgot to watch her back when she was watching them.

"All it would take is a push, and the sun will do the rest for me." She didn't move a muscle as the voice was followed by the cold touch of metal on her left cheek. She could smell the polished steel.

Weight on her right wrist, she flipped the center of gravity from hips to chest, then thrust all four of her limbs in unison, the heel of her left foot catching the large man between right thigh and crutch. His reaction was instant, folding his body around the kick to lessen the impact, the katana in his right hand going down as it followed his movement, spinning the blade in his hand and circling it around her kicking leg to lock it in place. In a fraction of a second, he would grip her exposed shin with his left hand, holding her leg in a lifted, poorly balanced position. She had expected that, and quickly put the weight of her entire body, what little that was, on his thick arm, using her thigh against the back of the katana blade as both balance and pivot as she swung her remaining leg off the ground, striking the man in the side of his right knee with over half the mass of herself.

He growled. What he didn't do was fall. Hanging awkwardly in the air, her body posed as it was when the last kick found its target, she spent over a second trying to figure out her next move. That was not like her.

"Well," she said, as calmly as she could, "it seems like you're the one to tell me." The man let go of her leg, plopping her on the rooftop like just another garbage bag. All throughout it, he had never dropped the katana. With an exagerrated flip and swing, he got the katana back in its sheath, mounted on his back.

Selene got up slowly, at all time keeping an eye on the man. She was pretty sure she knew him by reputation, but it felt unwise to tip her hand this early. It would be better to let him speak. She did examine him closely, though, as she started to move slowly around him. He had cornered her in the shadow of the building ventilation, but he could not possibly cover it entirely, if he decided to come at her. His one advantage had been surprise, and for whatever reason, he had wasted that in a silly show of superiority.

"You're the vampire who kills her own, aren't you?" he asked, in a slow, deep voice. "Selene, wasn't it?" It was clear that he already knew, he was only testing to see her reaction. She said nothing, which was essentially the equivalent of confirming him. While she casually prowled around him in a perfect arc, he stood absolutely still, arms slack by his sides. He was, like her, clad entirely in black, straps and belts seemingly making up half of what he wore. Unlike her, he seemed to be carrying an arsenal of tools and weapons with him, undoubtedly weighing him massively down. She wasn't just idly judging his fashion choices. Odds were, she could outrun and outmaneuver him in her much lighter outfit. She had no intention of testing it yet, though, looking instead for any other weakness in his person.

He walked over to the edge, never crouching, clearly not caring if he was seen. Arrogance. She might be able to use it against him, as well. He did make sure to stand in the sunlight, though. He was not lycan, but not a vampire, either. Most of all, she doubted he was a human.

"So, what did you make of the show below?" he asked. He seemed to be outright mocking her by not keeping the slightest bit of an eye on her, at least not in an obvious way. "Vampire? Werewolf?" He paused, still looking only at the events unfolding below, as if she was unimportant, harmless. It was a very deliberate provocation, and it was almost working. Almost. "Bigfoot?"

Showing her contempt at his provocations, Selene herself stepped not only to the edge of the building, but stood with much of her left side in the direct sunlight. Shoulder, elbow, left thigh, tucking the left hand carefully away on her stomach. It was childish, to the point of animalistic, a silly little dance of posing and counter-posing. It was also working.

"Too crude and public to be vampire. Too thought-out to be lycan." She rolled her eyes as she paused, making sure not to let him notice. If he even could see her eyes through his thick shades. "Too real too be Bigfoot." She knelt down, not so much to hold her balance, but more to focus her eyes. It was mostly in her mind, of course. That extra proximity was not physically needed.

"You spared me just for my opinion?" she asked the man. He smiled, his white teeth looking like a flash of light behind his dark skin. She never even saw him pick the small card from his pocket before he handed it to her.

"You're a bit less... intimidating than me," he said with a mild chuckle. "I'd like you to hand this over to the male FBI agent down there." She agreed. None of them would fit into the typical cocktail party in their work clothes, but at least her lack of multiple visible weapons might avoid inciting a fully fledged shootout with the police on mere principle.

Her gaze again turned to the people below. The dance of investigation continued down there, as the sun grew higher in the sky. The humans. The one threat greater than the lycans, and they were apparently outmatched by whatever had torn through the city. She had no idea whether to be pleased, or share their dread of it.

Mulder was less than happy about the situation. Not just that there were strong indications that his reputation as "Spooky" Mulder might be getting around to the newer agents, judging by the now gone trio that had been there, but also that things seemed less clear-cut than before. He had been out of the game for quite a while, and technically, he was not even in the game again now. He and Scully were "consulting" agents, pulled in only because of their experiences with extreme cases. With no network, no Lone Gunmen, no contacts in the shadows, he felt very much out of his league.

That, and he was starting to hate the text messages from his new bosses, breathing over their shoulders at every turn.

On the ground, the waste from his sunflower habits was piling up. It was becoming less of an enjoyment, and more of a nervous habit. He needed help. Scully was there to lend the critical eye, but he needed someone on the other side of the fence, someone to help him... He thought about it for a moment. Yes. He needed someone to help him be paranoid.

Perhaps boosted by his thoughts of lacking strangeness, he felt his heart leap when he spotted someone watching form the shadows. People always came out to watch these things, and Los Angeles was waking up. But ordinary folks just gawked from the sidelines, police pushing them back every now and then to protect the crimescene. Ordinary folk did not hide in the shadow to watch.

Thanking his stroke of luck that the person did not run, he cast a glance over his shoulder, making sure nobody was watching him. They were a fair bit away from the main scene, but Scully was an alert woman, and even the local PD seemed fairly observant, perhaps from the rush of frightened mystery at the crime. But whatever the case, he was apparently free to talk to this conspicuous stranger alone.

"You're FBI, right?" she said. She was dressed in black, looking a bit pale. Of course, she was hiding in the shadows of the old factory building, she could have been in black and white for all he knew. Mulder nodded, turning around in what he felt was an elegant move to show the letters put on his trenchcoat's back. "What can I do for you, young lady," he asked politely. She looked about 20 years old, perhaps a little more. She was definitely wearing the sort of skintight fashion that seemed popular, or maybe he was just getting old. Then again, this was L.A.

She peeked around the corner of the close, adjacent factory building, staying hidden in the dark. It felt almost like the old days, Mulder thought to himself, concealing a nostalgic smile. Scully tended to complain that he was the only person on the planet to actually be disappointed that the Mayan prophecy did not come true as they had been told long ago. That, of course, was not true. But he did miss the old days, quite often.

"I have it from good sources that you might want to take a look at the ones controlling the basement that thing climbed out of," said the woman. She seemed either a combination of coy and nervous, or as if she was poorly concealing her boredom. Mulder chuckled. "I'm not exactly a spring chicken, miss. We already did, and it was just some defunct storage facility." He was getting worried. He might have been expecting too much from this mystery woman.

"Look, Mulder... It's Mulder, right? Fox Mulder?" She had peeked his interest. "You of all people should know the difference between the people owning something and the people controlling it."

Not even knowing that he was giving the woman a very skeptical, slightly startled glance, Mulder took the business card she handed him without question. He looked at it, not knowing exactly what to expect. It had a phone number written with pen on the back. No name or further instructions. He turned it over. A red and white logo, and the words "Umbrella Corporation" in big letters.

Chapter 11

"It's not a typo, Dean. It's another word for deer," said Sam in his best schoolteacher fashion as they entered "Hart" casino. He was not as much trying to correct his brother as to distract him from the obvious itch to gamble that was starting to show. The drive from L.A. to Las Vegas had made Sam tired, but it had clearly made Dean restless. Or maybe that was just a side effect from the overdose of saturated fats he had ingested from the burger earlier.

Their accident victim turned tour guide was still not sitting well with either of them. His limp seemed to appear and disappear at random, and he seemed awfully eager to show them around. He had suggested he might need a bit of help getting to the casino, but he had not only taken the short walk there in a fair stride, he had also tried to get the two Winchesters to hurry up more than once. Dean was seeing it, too, as shown by a worry on his face in spite of his joy at the prospect of a round of Blackjack.

The casino itself had an odd feel to it, even from the outside. It lacked some of the frivolous undertones of the other ones around, looking more like the place serious business people would come to relax than a place for drunken tourists to get seperated from large chunks of their available cash. The security at the door also seemed a bit on the excessive side, in numbers as well as in physique.

"Hello, Spike, how are you doing, you look very fine and healthy, let's go over here and have a talk!" Neither of the two brothers had noticed the large man in the leather jacket sneak up on them, but he appeared as if out of nothing, to put his arm around their guide and turn him, by force, in a direction away from the casino.

"Hey, wow, uhm, hi there, big guy," Dean managed to get out without stumbling too much, "would you mind not... that?" Snapping quickly out of the surprise of seeing the big man lead the Billy Idol lookalike away, Dean found his usual tough-guy voice again. The man turned around, looking at them for a moment with unexpectedly friendly eyes.

"Sorry, but you really shouldn't let this pile of scum take you anywhere in this town. Or any other town, for that matter," he said, sounding honestly concerned.

The smaller one, Spike, was doing his best to wriggle out of the man's grip. For a moment, they looked like two brothers having a falling out. Both dressed in dark leather, both had hair set like 80s punk rock band members, and both had a brutish quality to them.

"Did you notice that our tour guide suddenly seems a lot less friendly?" Dean remarked under his breath. Sam nodded, taking a step forward to pat their new friend on the back. "Excuse me," he said in his friendliest voice, doing his best to match the man's previous tone. "Do you mind filling us in before you start hurting him? He did offer to help us."

The big man turned again, to look at Sam. The two were roughly the same size, which carried part of the reason for Sam's politeness. There was no reason to pick fights with someone they had no idea if they could beat. The smaller Spike was more or less pulled around as the man turned, pushing him just a touch out of the shade and into the sunlight. He jumped immediately as the sun touched his hand, making the skin fizzle. Both Sam and Dean jumped back, Dean grabbing for his emergency gun, only now realizing that with the whole accident thing, he had left it in the car. Sam stopped grabbing for his own firearm when the big man pulled Spike inside the shade again, clearly aware of what had just happened, and held a hand up, urging everybody to calm down.

"Oh what, Angel, you think I would actually lead two strangers in there just to throw them to the wolves?" complained Spike, finally pulling himself loose from the man's grip. For whatever resaon, he didn't run. "They'd be perfectly safe for an hour or so." The big man, Angel looked at him with an astoundingly cold, calm expression. "And then what? Your playmates in there would just let them leave? These guys have a reputation, you know. Even if the average clientel in there wouldn't jump them, Wolfram and Hart still has an agenda, and guys like these belong in a very bad drawer in their big designs."

"Okay, okay, guys," said Dean with a fake smile, "can we all just calm down and not make a scene here. You're scaring the kids." He waited for everyone to act calmly. Which, to his clear surprise, took only a second or so. "Look, Spike?" The smaller man, the vampire, nodded, still trying to get his jacket back on right after being flung around like an uncooperative shopping bag. "You're a vamp, and to be honest, I'm not a fan. Now Andre the Giant here..." "Angel," the other man interrupted, clearly not earning any points from Dean in the process. "Angel the... giant, here, can have all the fun with you he wants for my sake. I mean, you two look close, and this is Vegas, so bring out the champagne or whatever. But first..." Still lacking his gun, Dean flashed the two large hunting knives inside his jacket, "how about we get a full briefing on what you've been up to for the last ten minutes or so of pulling us around, huh?"

"So, I assume the two of you know how vampires work, right?" said Angel, drawing out the last word to emphasize his worry. Playing it as cool as possible in a slightly messed up situation Dean and Sam both just nodded their heads, adding a few grunts to complete the image. "Okay, because those knives, although, I mean, very impressive and all," he continued, gesturing Dean not to feel any offence, "they're not going to do a lot of damage in the long run, unless you're insanely good at playing butcher."

Dean put on his cocky smirk, clearly still not a fan of the big guy. He was walking between him and Sam, and was starting to feel like the baby brother in a family of football players. Spike, still cursing under his breath, was walking a few steps in front, barely ever out of the watchful gaze of Angel.

"Look, big guy," he started, but Angel made a confused gesture, half pointing at Sam to compare their physical stature, "okay, look, Angel," Dean corrected, not wanting to offend their newest companion needlessly, "it's very clear that the two of you have a past or something, but exactly why are you getting involved here? I mean, other than presumably saving our bacon from a casino full of nasties. Which still blows my mind a bit, I might add."

Angel suddenly began looking over his shoulders. He had been trained entirely on the Spike fellow up till this point, but apparently, there were other things to worry about, too. "The place you were about to step into belongs to a company called Wolfram and Hart," he started, slowing down as he spoke, clearly uncomfortable speaking the name. Sam tried to lighten the mood by repeating the name, clearly seeing the wolf, ram and hart symbolism of it. Angel took a breath, then continued. "They have a bit of a reputation, and there's been some activity these last few days that mildly put, I don't care for. And now, with this last incident..." "What incident?" Dean interrupted. Angel stopped dead in his tracks, reaching out and grabbing Spike by the neck, causing the vampire to curse and complain out loud at the overall treatment, muttering something about vampire protective services, clearly trying to be funny.

"This morning, not more than a few hours ago, some lunatic races up the Strip in a Hummer with barely any tires left, mixing half the sidewalk with the remains of about a dozen pedestrians in the process." The man's seriousness was cut short by simultaneous reactions from both Sam and Dean, taking him a bit aback. He continued, nonetheless. "The guy, who, by the way, supposedly looked like he could eat both me and the two of you for breakfast and still feel hungry, rips through people like wet paper before grabbing a fresh car and getting the hell out of Dodge. Now, what I worry about..."

Dean's reaction grew to waving hands and a "wow, wow, wow" before he finally got Angel to stop his incessant exposition. The hunter stood for a moment, making sure that the man was actually silent, before he chimed in. "So there has been a carmaggedon going on a stone's throw from here, and nobody is talking about it?" Angel looked at him, clearly confused at his, their, ignorance of the incident. "Who have you been speaking to?" he then asked, looking first at Dean, then Sam. All three in a chorus then turned their heads to look at Spike.

"Aw come on!" he proclaimed, stomping his foot and looking like he was trying to scout out an escape plan, "I distract a couple of strangers a bit and suddenly I'm the bad guy!?" His nostrils flaring like a man about to snap and punch someone he knew would end him, Spike stood, waving his arms restlessly around while muttering foul language to himself. Occassionally, he'd point angrily at one or more of them.

Dean smiled overly sweetly at him. "Look, Punk Rock Pete, once you've remembered your anger management class and calmed the hell down, do you mind telling us what you mean by distracted?"

The vampire clearly minded. Then again, he had no reason to feel he even had a choice in the matter.

Chapter 12

The hallway was fairly quiet. The sturdy walls would keep the noise of a full-strength hurricane out, but inside, there were usually voices and the sound of distant footsteps echoing around a bit. Right now, everything was just silent.

Jack felt a bit better that way, finding the right time and quiet spot to indulge in his forbidden sin. He still had a bit of a problem getting used to his new cellphone, constantly falling into the habit of using it like he would a walkie talkie. It was an impressive technology, but he was an old dog, and learning new tricks took a while. However, playing free games on it, lining up three symbols or slicing fake fruit, was a welcome break from the tedium of babysitting new recruits for the base.

What was even more impressive was the reception the good doctor had been able to get through the gate. McKay, that is, not Jackson. Daniel was still preoccupied with his latest finds, returned by one of the teams, hiding away with his books. Five orange blobs in one move! The General made a celebratory elbow pump, closing the screen just in time before four guards came around the corner, rushing but in formation.

"Sergeant, what's the rush for?" he asked, making the entire quartet stop as their sergeant turned to salute the general. The remaining three guards followed the salute with their own. "General, Sir, just a precaution. Some disturbences were reported in town," he said in his most formal voice. Jack gestured him to ease up. "What does that have to do with us, sergeant?" he asked.

"Sir, an unidentified driver sideswiped two cars at Woodland Park, killing two and injuring four, then continued at extreme speed with two highway patrol cars in full pursuit. Local PD tried cutting the car off near Manitou Springs but failed." The soldier briefly shifted to a normal, everyday voice. "We thought you knew, sir." Jack gave the soldier a surprised expression. "Why would I be alerted about a police matter?" he asked, honestly worrying that he was somehow being kept out of the loop. Or a loop, anyway.

"Sir, it's a nearly wrecked pink Ferrari Enzo, and it's heading down Broadmoor at almost 120 mph." The soldier looked a bit confused, or nervous. "We sort of assumed everybody in a ten mile radius was following the chase."

"Status report?" Jack almost shouted as he entered the control room. Of the five people there, barely anyone noticed him. Everyone was staring closely at the biggest screen in the room, which showed a helicopter view of a car, seemingly pink but immensely damaged, making its way through light traffic with five or more police cars on trying to stay on its tail but failing miserably.

One of the staff finally did react, turning her office chair and punching up a few graphics on some of the smaller monitors. "General, sorry, but we only became aware of the situation moments ago, after it was heading for the police blockade on the 24." She enlarged one of the graphics, turning her head to the big screen for a second, clearly weighing whether or not to put the image up there. She decided not to cut off the television feed, though, staying instead with the smaller monitor.

"We had one of the satelites do a quick read on the car. The infrared is a mess, almost like someone threw random warm bits in the driver's seat but not an actual body. The radiation, however," she clicked a key on the nearest keyboard, and the graphics switched to what looked like the close-up of a Jackson Pollock painting, "is completely off the charts." The young woman turned and looked at the general, looking very perplexed. "Sir, I've never seen readings like this.

"I have," Jack said, doing his best to not look worried. "It's a radiation leak. But what's it doing in a Ferrari?"

Giving out a constant, rattling scream of metal grinding metal down without mercy inside a broken engine frame, the Ferrari was filling up with smoke as the engine overheated and the tires continued to slowly melt. Everything was hit enough to burn flesh from bone, and the sole occupant of the car did have several burns to prove it. He made no sign of caring about that, though, keeping his eyes straight on the road ahead.

The car made a roaring outburst of what almost seemed like actual, physical pain as the unflinching driver shifted to lower gears. The highway long gone, the car was now forced to maneuver down less and less straight city streets. Broadmoor, Gladstone, then Paisley. The route did not bring it to its destination, but Norad Road was heavily watched by the military. Paisley Drive, not so much.

With the otherwise lightning fast car now trapped in winding city streets, and with its performance falling apart at an alarming rate, the police cars added to the chase last were finally able to catch up to it. Better yet, the driver had taken a road that would soon end blind, and the only other escape route was Buttermere Drive, which was already crowding up with police. There was no way out.

Then, without warning, the nearly destroyed high performance vehicle took a sharp left turn, cutting through an elaborate front yard before hitting a wooden wall dividing the adjacent driveway from the house next door. As the wooden wall exploded in a shower of splinters and bits of carbon-fibre panels, the remaining car took flight for a distance roughly twice its own length, then came crashing down into a row of decorative garden trees. Dirt and small trees flying about, it took the car several seconds to be slowed to a complete halt, the pursuing police cars crowding around the completely destroyed property line between the two houses.

High above, the police helicopter came down slowly, getting a clearer view of the wreckage, media helicopters hovering as close by as they legally could. Looking through his scope, the sharpshooter on the helicopter's side kept his sights keen on the wreck, barely breathing. He had already fired multiple shots, most of which went clear through the driver side space of the car. They had done nothing.

As the car and the surrounding flora began catching fire, movement could suddenly be seen in the driver's seat. The clicks of over a dozen handguns and rifles being taken off safety was loud enough to almost be heard by the Colorado Springs residents hiding inside the two houses.

With everyone watching breathlessly, the broken and bent remains of the driver side door came off quite violently, flying a short distance before sliding across the still intact parts of the lawn. As if trying to needlessly build more dramatic tension, the driver waited a good few seconds before exiting the car. At long last, he slowly stepped out of the vehicle, although nothing gave the police present the sense that he did it because they were asking him to over a megaphone.

With leather pants ripped from holding in legs the size of treetrunks and wearing an open-chested blue leather jacket full of tassels, the gigantic humanoid figure stepping out of the now slowly burning wreck had everyone hesitating to react. Charred chunks of flesh exposed metallic inners almost like bones, glistening in the afternoon sun and surrounding flames. The leather ensemble itself had not yet caught fire, but the rips from his size and the cuts and burns from the wild ride and damaged vehicle made them look like they might desintegrate at any moment.

As the first police officer, whether ordered or not, fired off a shot, the one third of Colorado Springs' law enforcement and assisting highway patrol units opened fire and a blaze of guns and rifles!

Chapter 13

Everything turned pitchblack. Then, it got even darker. Rose wanted to gasp, but something felt like cold, clammy hands around her neck. In fact, the darker-than-darkness felt like it was constricting her entire body, like she had been buried alive.

Then, the moment was over.

Sunlight shone down on green grass, soft rolling hills as wide as the eye could see. A river could be heard nearby, the air fresh and slightly damp, as if it had just rained an hour or so ago. Rose failed to properly enjoy the loving arms of Mother Nature around them, though, falling to one knee, hand supporting her body to keep it from a fall, gasping deeply for air.

"That's alright. You should have seen me when she did it first time," quipped Ronald, the redheaded man from the plane. He himself stood just to the right of Rose, in front of the Doctor, only seperated by a young woman. "Where are we?" he added, suddenly seeming a bit less confident.

Rose looked at the Doctor, as he stood behind them. The tall man said nothing, staring just blankly into the air. She waited, but there was no actual reaction from him. She was starting to worry if he was breathing at all.

"That," said the young woman, pausing for a moment, either for drama or to catch her breath, as well, "is the last time I'll do that, Ron." Rose had a hard time determining if the woman was startled, out of breath, frustrated or angry. Oddly enough, however, she could fully sympathize with that indeterminate mix of emotions. Thinking of that, for some reason, made her look at the Doctor again.

"Doctor?" she asked, waving a hand in front of his face. She well near feared he might just tumble over, stiff as a board, but he finally blinked. "Are you doing well?" The Doctor, still not answering Rose's actual question, frantically patted himself down, as if he feared something of him might be missing, or radically different. "You," he said, very slowly, turning his head to the young woman. She looked worried at him, perhaps because his eyes looked disturbingly mental. "... have... to teach me that..."

Ignoring the Doctor, the young woman whispered something into the ear of Ronald, or Ron, as she had called him, then gave him something in his hand. All Rose and the Doctor knew about her was that she was apparently very powerful with what Ron at least called "magic", and her name started with "Her". She had immediately chastized Ron for wanting to call her by name, showing very little trust towards the presence of Rose and the Doctor. The two seemed polar opposites, one clumsy and trusting, the other extremely powerful and distrustful. What to make of that, however, was beyond either Rose or the Doctor.

Of course, the Doctor seemed not to burden his mind with that at the moment, being completely infatuated with the fact that they were now in the US. "Her" had appeared in the plane bathroom shortly after Ron had done a spell of some sort. Rose had a distinct feeling that he had not so much summoned the woman as he had asked her if she wouldn't mind dropping by on her own accord. Whatever their relationship, she seemed to make the final decision on things like this. The two had had their own little argument, making sure the Doctor and Rose did not hear. In fact, the Doctor had remarked that not only were they quiet, they made no sound at all, arguing, which again convinced him that their supposed magic was involved. An exact explanation to how it worked had not come to him, though.

"So, where are we, anyway?" asked Ron. The process of having the woman get them there had been a bit odd. She had, with his permission, touched the Doctor's forehead with her magic stick, asking him to think quite clearly about the place to get them to. Then, the suffocating darkness, and they were there. Here. Whereever!

They were briefly interrupted by the woman saying something rather dramatically in Latin, upon which she seemed to swirl and shrink into her own belly button and disappear. The Doctor was highly distracted by that, and instinctively pulled out his sonic screwdriver to examine the spot she had stood in, only to groan at the brass cylinder he had forgotten it was placed in for safe keeping.

Apparently having no other way of studying the woman's vanishing spot, he put back the cylinder into his jacket, turning to his now two companions. "Salem," he said, making no real spectacle of it. Ron froze, giving out a loud whimper. "Not that Salem," the Doctor added, "Salem, New York. Actually, North Salem, if that matters much." Ron was still standing stiffly, a terrified look on his face. The Doctor finally turned to him, sighing behind a friendly smile. "No witchhunts, I promise. Completely different place. And, you know, different century." He gave Ron an overly chummy pat on the shoulder, snapping the man out of his terror.

"This is it," the Doctor proudly proclaimed, arms out in the best tadaah showman style. They were standing at the gates of a mansion that semmed to be luxurious, but had a definite weed problem. Or maybe Americans just have a funny idea what constitutes gardens, Rose thought to herself. It was very beautiful, though, reminding her of some of the old mansions dotting the countryside back home.

"Is this yours?" asked Ron, sounding more skeptical than impressed for some reason. The Doctor turned to him, still grinning from the tadaah. "Oh no, too big on the outside for me," he almost chimed, causing Rose to smile at the obvious reference as he added, "and a bit too cramped and crowded on the inside."

"Looks nice," was the entirety of Ron's reply.

The Doctor was about to respond on Ron's apparent lack of amazement, when the gate suddenly opened, clearly controlled from somewhere else. Rose and Ron looked at each other, feeling an odd sense of fateful baiting from the mansion, while the Doctor excitedly clapped his hands to himself, then went in with long, joyful strides, waving for the two to follow him.

"It's a school," whispered the Doctor to them, loudly enough that the whispering was probably more for show than effect, although neither of them could figure out why. "It's rather posh, and very expensive, unless you catch the attention of some of the people at the top." While Rose was awestruck at the idea of a mansion of this size and luxury being a school, Ron still seemed disturbingly underwhelmed by it.

"Jimmy!" shouted the Doctor without warning, nearly scaring the wits out of both his companions. He had his arms stretched out in the friendliest of manners towards the main entrance. At the large front door of the mansion stood a large, bulgy man. Not tall, in fact, he appeared slightly shorter than Rose, which seemed short for a man of his build. No, his size was in muscles. And hair. Definitely hair. In fact, adding the hair might make him taller than her. Of course, it could simply be the distance to the door or its size that threw her sense of size off a bit.

Clearly not in a rush, the man trodded down the small flight of stairs, walking slowly towards them. Considering the walkway from gate to door, it would be a few seconds before they even met. The man at first seemed perfectly calm, but then looked around, clearly seeing if he was being watched. Whatever he concluded, he proceeded then to take a cigar stump out of his chest pocket and put it in his mouth.

"Guys, this is James," the Doctor started off, then clearly considered what he'd said very closely. "Then again, he' d probably prefer you calling him Logan, he's a bit touchy on that matter." Rose and Ron just nodded, Ron now looking at his cellphone very intently. At this point, Rose was becoming outright annoyed that the man showed such little interest in the mansion-school. She gave him a quick jab with her elbow, shaking him to attention, and he finally put away the phone. Although she made her best effort to gesture that he should pay attention and maybe enjoy the beauty of the place, the look he gave her seemed hard pressed to build much enthusiasm. He didn't seem outright bored or displeased with anything, just... not impressed.

Meeting them about halfway from the door, the man really was shorter than Rose, although his unusual, upward turned style of hair made him more the height of Ron, with the Doctor naturally standing well above them all. Looking as uncomfortable about the Doctor's social manners as Rose remembered once being, the man, Logan, met his stretched out arms with a hearty handshake and a slap on the shoulder hard enough that Rose noted the Doctor flinching. Somehow, she felt the man was not poorly estimating his own strength, but more doing it to tease the Doctor. The whole meet had a strong feeling of old guyfriend oneupmanship.

"Friends, this is one of my oldest friends on this planet," said the Doctor, still smiling despite a slight undertone of ache after the shoulderslap. Logan stuck out a hand that looked like it had been lifting small cars since early childhood at Rose, making her feel like a small child herself as she tried to give a proper handshake. Despite the smell of stale cigar and the man's clear aversion to shaving, she couldn't help but smile girlishly. He then turned to Ron, who flinched immediately, looking at the man's giant hands and massive arms. Logan apparently got the message and stuck to a friendly half salute, half wave at the guy, which Ron returned with a somewhat effeminate wave and nervous smile.

"The professor never told me you were on your way here, Doc," said the man, somehow managing to talk without removing the large cigar stub from his mouth. The Doctor shook his head. "A fairly sudden decision, I couldn't get a hold of him in time," he said, his voice suddenly very serious. Judging from the look in his eyes, the Doctor was thinking about the badly damaged TARDIS, which Rose had long since learned was to him what her phone was to her: An essential survival tool, and the means for keeping in touch with practically everyone he knew.

She was about to ask the Doctor for a more detailed introduction to the man, for some reason feeling an urge to tell him her name, when she noted a small head sticking out behind him. A child, possibly age 10 or 11, stood behind Logan, too shy to step out from behind him, but too curious to not stick her head out. Rose waved to the little girl. Her long, dark-brown ponytail dangled behind her head as she shook with a shy smile.

"You're normal," she said with a slight giggle. Rose nodded back with a smile, not knowing exactly ow to respond to that appraisal. "He's a mutant," said the girl, pointing at ron, "and that one is really strange," she said, pointing at the Doctor. Logan turned to see the girl behind him, giving her a friendly pat on the head.

"I think we should take this inside," he said to the Doctor.

As they went towards the large door, Ron looked a bit upset. "I'm not a mutant, " he complained in a low voice to Rose. She simply smiled back. "I'm really not," he insisted.

Chapter 14

"That man is no angel," said Castiel, scaring the living daylights out of both Dean and Sam. Angel seemed completely unaffected by the actual angel suddenly showing up behind them. Dean quickly checked the Spike person, or vampire, to make sure he didn't use their brief lapse of concentration to make a run for it. He, on the other hand, was looking past the three at Cass, his eyes eyes open wide with surprise.

"Okay, tell me I'm crazy, but that guy just popped out of nothing," he said, pointing at Castiel in a way that looked more like accusation, and less like observation. Everybody ignored him.

"Dean, he's a vampire." Castiel looked at Dean with very worried eyes, but Dean just nodded, holding up a calming hand. "We know, Cass, Angel here stopped him from leading us into an ambush at a vamp casino." Castiel shook his head, pointing at Angel. "No, he's a vampire," he reiterated.

Their faces a mix of surprise and anger, both Sam and Dean took a few steps away from the big man, looking at him unflinchingly. Had anyone turned to give him the time of day, they would have seen Spike grinning wide, making a happy gesture of stretched out arms. "Ah, justice, finally the big..." "Shut up!" the four of them said in unintended chorus. Spike mumbled something, then fell quiet.

"Look, I just pulled your friend out of a wasp's nest full of vampires, ghouls, and worse. You might want to extend me a bit of credit before you go pointing your fingers, mister," Angel said in an unexpectedly hurt and soft voice. Sam was slowly slipping his hand inside his jacket for anything he might use to impale the man, but Dean gave him a sign to ease down. The situation was becoming a very confusing Mexican stand-off, and Dean was not keen on any sudden moves that could not be taken back.

Castiel just looked at Angel, showing no change in emotion or attention. His eyes were the same kind of mix between sad and angry he always got when dealing with things he didn't like. The Winchesters knew that look, and perhaps part of htem were more uneasy about what the actual angel might do, rather than the man calling himself Angel.

"Whatever your actions, you cannot escape or lie about who and what you are," he said to the man. Still, he made no threatening moves or any sign that he wanted to start a fight. For some reason, he seemed honestly interested in Angel. "What's your real name, vampire?" he asked the big man.

Angel raised his hands in frustrated disbelief, his eyes and mouth open like a child who'd been accused of cookie theft and denying it wholeheartedly. "What is it with you people," he said in a slightly whiny voice, "I do my best to help you, and you just keep throwing it back in my face. Is it really such a big thing what I am, when all I'm trying to do is help? Shut up, Spike!" The last three words came at the exact appropriate time to stop the smaller vampire from breaking out in a what looked as if it could have been a full cheerleader routine at the speech.

"His name," said a slow, sarcastic-sounding voice in the street, "is Liam. He started calling himself Angelus and then later just Angel to mock his victims and make floppy-haired little blonds swoon over him, isn't that right, Angel darling?" Dean grumbled and cursed to himself as he recognized the voice talking to the group. "Crowley, you sick, twisted bastard, what's your play in this farce?" he snarled, not even giving the man the respect of turning around to face him.

"What, a simple man is no longer allowed to enjoy a show in this city? What is the world coming to, I wonder sometimes," said the demon. Spike was silently pointing at him, fonger, hand, arm and all. Crowley waved away his accusing gesture. "Yeah, yeah, you little freak, they already figured that out," said Crowley, his voice clearly meant to both scold and mock the vampire. "See, we have a bit of a past..." "Not one we couldn't do without," Dean said loudly, still refusing to turn around and acknowledge Crowley.

"Not you, dimwit. Me and the big one." Crowley waved his finger at Angel. "Isn't that right, boy? Met before, haven't we, down in the Pit?" he spoke with a needlessly loud voice, probably trying to get some emotional reaction from Angel. The vampire faked a smile in his direction. "I believe you were rather confounded about your little harpy kicking you out. I mean, I've been kicked out of a few doors and windows myself, but out of your entire dimension and into my little neck of the woods, that's gotta sting, doesn't it?"

Everyone except Crowley flinched when Angel's face turned, exposing his teeth as he leapt through the air at Crowley. While Dean and Sam reacted by instantly crouching and grabbing for whatever weapons they had the easiest access to, and Spike simply smiling, Castiel reached out his hands to tell the big vampire to stop, but he was too slow. A whoosh and the sound of metal rang out through the air, as chains shot through it to strike and wrap themselves around every part of the lunging vampires body. All but Angel and Crowley followed the chains with their eyes, back to where a large figure clad in a full-body black outfit with dramatic white patterns and an explosion of red cape and more chains stood. While Dean and Sam immedaitely noticed the two very large semi-automatics in the figure's hands, wondering how he threw the chains, both Spike and Castiel instantly looked at the glowing green eyes of the creature.

"Tsk... tsk... tsk, Liam, where is your famed self-control now," Crowley taunted, making sure to stay in the sunlight. "What plans did you have for fighting me in the pretty pretty sunlight, little friend? Perhaps my companion here could pull you into it, help you work on that tan?" The chains seemed to move by themselves as they flung Angel back, slamming him into the wall that kept all but Crowley and his unnamed bodyguard in the shade from the noon sun.

"If you want anything done," Crowley said loudly, almost like an actor trying to shout to an entire theater, then shifting to a low, playful voice, "you have to do it yourself." He now stood close enough to Angel to touch, taunting the vampire by his mere presence, as chains kept wrapping themselves tighter and tighter around the big body.

"Impressive what my predecessor managed to waste on petty infighting, isn't it?" he said loudly, standing up fully, to gesture at his bodyguard in front of everyone present. Sam was the only one not to pay the demon full attention, looking around for any sign that someone, anyone, was noticing all of this happen. Not because he wanted anyone to call the police. That was what he actually feared. The police would just bring guns to a monster fight.

"Down boy," said Crowley to the cape-clad, gun-wielding figure standing a surprising bit of distance from them down the street. The chains continued to tighten even more around Angel, making him groan in pain. Crowley looked down the street at the figure, waving his hand in a questioning manner at him. The chains finally loosened, freeing the vampire and dropping him to the ground. Crowley had now moved a bit farther away from him, keeping his eyes on him at all time. "Are you a nice boy now, Liam? Because my little hellspawn there is going to be watching you, all of you, no matter where I turn my back, capiche?"

Crowley then began to strut around, looking from one of them to the other, but saying nothing. After upwards of half a minute of nothing else happening, Castiel finally broke the silence.

"Your theatrics don't impress any of us," he said in a weary voice, pointing a threatening finger at Spike to stop his disagreement before he had a chance to speak. "Are you going to tell us what you want or just prance for us all day?" At the last remark, Crowley just looked at the angel with a smile, then lifted his long coat a bit and made a few elegant dance steps and spun around, bowing slightly as a finishing touch. Dean turned his eyes away for a moment, trying to estimate Castiel's mood in all of this. The angel was seething, the look in his eyes only second to the looks in the now human eyes of Angel, who was still slowly getting off the ground, his entire body sore.

"Nothing," Crowley finally said, his tone back to its loathsome, arrogant self, no theatrics added. "I want... nothing." Sam was about to offer the demon exactly that, and loudly so, but Crowley clearly anticipated the comeback, pointing a finger at him and then flipping that finger towards the ground. "Sit, Moose, you don't have the wits, anyway." Strolling along the very edge of the shade, although he kept no eye on Angel or Spike, or the Winchesters, for that matter, Crowley started pulling his leather gloves off, one finger at a time.

"I want absolutely nothing to happen," he elaborated, looking at his hands as he took his time with the gloves. "Don't you just love it when the world throws a curve ball, Clarence?" His pauses were starting to get theatrical again, and everyone except Spike was clearly trying to figure out a way to get at the arrogant bastard without angering whatever that bodyguard of his was. "I mean, decades of this stale reality show unfolding at the speed of a glacier with a seat in the short bus, and then suddenly, somebody does something actually new, something actually fresh?"

"We give up, Crowley. Your methods of torture are inhumane, we'll say anything, if you'll just shut up or pretend like you have a point!" Dean was boiling over. He always had a sore spot for Crowley's taunts and arrogance, but the entire ordeal was mounting to a big, steaming plate of batshit crazy, and right now, all he wanted was for this little slice of madness to end so he could kill something. If not Crowley, then maybe one of the vampires.

"Now, now, Squirrel, let mommy and daddy fight, will you?" Crowley gave the hunter a playful look, then turned back to Castiel. "Eons on this dirtball floating in the black, and finally, something completely unexpected is starting to happen, and you know what?" he asked, gleaming with what seemed to be actual, honest joy, "I for one want it to unfold without a hiccup." He pointed at the group, his hand floating round the full five of them to make sure everyone felt included. "All I see here, are a bunch of hiccups wanting to spoil my fun. Can't let that happen, now, can we?"

"Sorry to burst your bubble, Fergie," coughed Angel, finally getting up to stand fully, his joints clearly still aching, "but you're not the only one with friends. Whoever you sent, we got some muscle on him as we speak." Stretching and twisting his neck as if to start jumping and daring Crowley to a boxing match, the vampire just smiled coyly, doing his best to taunt back at the demon.

"Oh," said Crowley, faking surprise, "so you're laboring under the idea that this," he pointed at the caped figure stillstanding down the street, "is my entire crew?" He laughed, a contemptable, arrogant, low laugh, his teeth flashing as if to make fun of the vampire who had just a moment ago been a whirlwind of fangs wanting to tear the demon limb from limb.

"I have someone watching over my little unplanned bundle of joy, don't you worry your pretty little soul about that, luv."

Chapter 15

With the roar of the bike's engine filling his ears, Johnny's eyes kept sweeping the streets for a clear sign of where the thing had headed. He had kept his distance, staying a few seconds behind it all the way from Los Angeles through Las Vegas and along the highway to here in Colorado, and he had regretted that. It had cost lives. And although something told him he would never have been able to save them anyway, he would have liked it better to have failed trying.

The helicopters above had been very indecisive, but they were now all moving in a general direction, going roughly southwest. The problem was the local police, their cars blocking every street, either through actual police blockades, or the burnt out or outright smashed ones that had tried to keep up with the Ferrari. Getting through the city streets was impossible, and the 24 and 25 going around it were both blocked by Colorado Springs' finest. He could get through, but he didn't really like the method it would require.

The roar and bright flash of at least one helicopter exploding changed that!

He looked around. The city was not exactly in chaos, but people were keeping off the streets and in their house, offices and stores. The local PD had been good at clearing the streets, perhaps expecting more kamikaze drivers to go roaring through like the first one. Johnny had seen no indication of a second one while on the heels of the first, but the police had every right to be cautious with the damage that one had already done. He only hoped he would not loose control and harm anyone innocent, himself.

Hell had been a weird place to get this order from. Ever since the whole uprising and Lucifer disappearing, Hell had been in utter chaos, or so he'd heard from sources. Nobody knew who held what contract, so when Johnny's suddenly turned up in the hands of the new bosses, he couldn't really be that surprised. What did surprise him was the apparent lack of digging they'd done on his track record. If they had, they would have never sent him out, at least not on his own. Which he still assumed he was. Rather than refuse, though, he'd decided to see what this was all about. Hell did not play casual with riders, so something had to be going on with that Ferrari.

And that was, to Johnny's better understanding, what he was chasing: The car. At his closest, he had glimpsed a driver behind the wheel, but innocent or guilty, he could always sense the soul inside people. This one was a blank. More than the violent driving or the complete disregard for life it had, the lack of a discernable soul scared Johnny.

The road was almost empty of cars as Johnny's bike rolled slowly around the corner. The 87 went straight through this part of Colorado Springs, and it seemed to go in roughly the right direction beyond that. A cluster of police cars formed a solid barricade down the road, but they were probably there to keep the phantom driver from taking that way back into town, not to keep anyone from taking it out. Coughing a bit as the taste of smoke slid through his mouth, Johnny felt his body heat up, every bit of it pumped and tinkling with the powers of the other side seeping through it. The bike felt like it was writhing beneath him, and he started to giggle slightly as the raw energy ran through him. The second he throttled the bike, his skin burst into flames.

Flames were everywhere. Norad Road was drowning in an inferno of gunfire and burning wreckage. Pieces of the police helicopter was everywhere, bits and pieces falling through houses nearby, with the larger part, the melted and bladeless rotor engine still barely possible to make out in the twisted mess of blackened metal.

At the mouth of the Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station, military forces had joined the police in their assault on the massive charred man walking towards the entrance. A hail of bullets did barely anything to stop him, at most slowing him down a bit. He had gaping wounds in his flesh, but was not even bleeding. Instead, metal stuck out of the wounds. Metal in his arms, in his torso, some visible in his leather-clad legs. Metal in his head. Metal, and glowing red eyes.

One soldier was frantically reloading the rocket launcher that had been hauled out after police actions completely failed to bring the man down. The first blast had actually done some damage, exposing his chest and causing it to sputter with powerful blue sparks. For a moment, everyone had held their breath as the man had stood still. That, however, had ended when he dug a small metal cartridge out of his stomach and hurled it at the police helicopter. The explosion had flattened every tree in the vicinity, throwing grown men to the ground and bathing everything in a burning light. More than half the police force present had been unresponsive since, and only the mountain tunnel had shielded the soldiers. Those standing outside... Well, they were the nedical staff's responsibility now.

Raising the rocket launcher, the soldier turned to aim, only to find the man standing practically at the mouth of the tunnel. Saying a quick prayer, the soldier pressed the trigger, sending the rocket hurtling at the metal man, only to see him sidestep it at the moment it fired, the rocket going past and detonating somewhere behind him. Throwing the spent rocket launcher aside, the solider dutifully grabbed his rifle and opened fire. After expending more than half his ammunition, the soldier could only look impotently at the man as he grabbed the barrel of the rifle and gave it a quick twist, seemingly just out of spite. Not a single bullet had managed to do significant damage.

Only once he reached the now closed blast door did he finally stop. For a moment, he seemed to have been beaten, but the moment quickly went by, as he started to beat against the door with frightening force, causing the tunnel walls to shed flakes of stone at the vibration. After several punches, he had managed a small hole in the surface of the door. As he turned around and walked back towards where the soldier had fired the rockets, every remaining soldier scrambled to get out of his way, a few firing off shots out of pure habit as they retreated.

The mouth of the tunnel spat fire as deep inside, the explosives of the first rocket were detonated against the small hole in the blast door. As the flames died down, the few soldiers daring to peer inside saw the man, now nothing but a gleaming metal skeleton, walk back to the now slightly bigger hole in the door, carrying the next explosive charge. When the second blast rang out, none of the soliders remained at the tunnel, neither one chancing what might follow. Instead, they heard the roar of an infernal engine, the combustion of Hell itself, come rushing at the pile of dirt, wreckage and bodies that seperated Paisley Drive from Norad Road!

To the tune of the third detonationg inside the tunnel, a black and metal motorcycle streaked through the air, shooting through the remnants of the down helicopter and taking flight itself over the once grassy bump between the roads. Chains seemed to flap in the wind around the bike, its leatherclad rider screaming to outdo the engine. His head was a naked skull engulfed in flames.

Pieces of debris from the now lost fight between the military and the metal man, now a metal skeleton, sprayed around the burning wheels of the dark motorcycle as it skidded to a halt inside the tunnel. Flames shooting from every opening in his leather outfit, the rider stepped off the bike, fixing his hollow eyes on the metal skeleton at the giant door. The metal skeleton barely registered him.

A fourth blast roared through the tunnel, flooding it in fire and sending a shockwave through it to clean out whatever bits had not been blown away by the first three. The flaming rider had not moved, but with a rattling sound, the motorcycle started to tilt over, before the rider grabbed it by the handle and adjusted its stance. "I have all the fire I need," said the rider with a voice that seemed to emanate from some pit and roar out through an endless tunnel. The metal man showed no signs of caring.

With a sound almost like the chimes of bells, a chain ending in a pointed metal weight slid out from the rider's wrist. As the metal skeleton slowly walked towards the now fairly deep hole in the blast door, the skeleton rider swung the chain above his head, its length growing with each circle it made. Whistling through the smokefilled air, the weight went straight through the pins and pistons of the metal skeleton, not even touching a single side of them, before it spun and twisted, wrapping itself around the internals of the metal skeleton's torso.

The metal skeleton still did not respond.

"Soul or no soul, you will answer to me," hissed the rider as he pulled the chain back, aiming to drag the metal skeleton to him. The metal skeleton still did not stop his pendulum walk between the blast door and the rocket explosives stashed in the corner under an assembled pile of wreckage. He did, however, respond. Reaching the door, he turned to face the rider, grabbing the chain sticking out of his, its, metal structure. The motion was slow, almost as if to signal the machine's complete lack of interest in the rider. It tugged on the chain, but like the machine itself before, the rider did not move the slightest.

Behind the blast door, deep inside the mountain, panic was beginning to show its ugly face. The sound of explosions at the outermost blast door had sent every available soldier running for their weapons. Jack was still ordering standard defensive preparations, but watching the events at the door by way of a single surviving security camera outside the tunnel, he was getting a feeling that they were outnumbered, even by only one enemy.

"What do we have on the other end of the gate right now?" he asked one of the senior technicians. The man called up a feed to their counterparts at the gate in the Pegasus galaxy, getting a fuzzy image of Col. Sheppard. "John, are you updated on the situation here?" the general said. There was a lot of static, but finally the colonel's voice came through enough to hear. "Only the basics, the signal is coming through poorly!" the man practically shouted through the heavy static.

Jack looked at the limited scientific crew in the control room. Jackson, for whatever reason, had not shown up yet. He looked at Carter, who was at one of the work stations in the room, trying to get the signal up to regular strength. "Can we get anything through, Carter?"

She let out a heavy sigh, raising her hands without taking her eyes off the screens in front of her. "Sorry, general, but at this rate, it's impossible to tell. Something is interfering with... everything." Jack stepped over to her, looking at her screens, even though he was fairly sure the scientific data racing across them would mean very little to him. "Can you fix the system?" he asked, but she shook her head. "It's not us, Jack," she replied, forgetting formal names in the frustration, "it's something blocking us, something between us and them."

Jack stared at her screens. The base was shielded against all radiation, and whatever lay physically between them and the other stargate was not an issue, not the way the gates worked. The link was gate-to-gate. Whatever was beating down their door, there was no way it could do anything out there to disrupt the connection between their gates.

"Drain all power you can get access to into the gate. We need a hole through, either for reenforcements or to escape." He took a deep breath, trying not to let his voice show the slightest sign of worry at the thought of running from whatever that thing out there was. "If we can't open that hole, we'll punch it through."

Samantha looked at him to confirm that he meant exactly what he said, then entered a security code to route everything at their disposal through the gate. A small alert showed on the screen, asking her for confirmation. With the click of a mouse, she set it all of it in motion.

Chapter 16

"Don't worry, young man," said the professor, turning his wheelchair slowly around to face the group, "the girl means nothing by it." Ron still seemed terribly uncomfortable about being called a mutant. Then again, he seemed uncomfortable about most things, most of the time. It seemed more a matter of his personality, and less of his opinions. "She merely sensed that you possess powers beyond those of ordinary human beings."

Rose patted Ron on the back, giving him a smile to cheer him up. It was hard to see if it worked, as his facial expression seemed fairly blank at the moment, but he managed a slight smile back. She took that as a positive.

The halls were wide, and the decoration had a very museum-like element to it. Every now and then, the walls had large paintings of indeterminate origins on them, often with persons that Rose could only wonder who were. The names and titles on the paintings told her nothing. Every now and then, a group of cildren or teenagers went by, carrying bags and books, making her think of her own days back at school. That, in turn, made the images in her mind clash, the idea of this place and of school not lining up in her head.

The small girl had joined whichever were the friends of hers, just as Logan had called for the professor. An older girl, equally shy but in a different way, had run to find this professor, whereever he might have been when they arrived. She had beautiful autumn hair, but Rose mostly noted the bright, white stripe in it. She had not returned. Instead, the professor had arrived with another man, wearing very stylish sunglasses, who left without talking to any of them.

"So, this is the man you were talking about," said the professor, turning his chair to look at the Doctor. "You say you know each other from the world that none of us will, luckily, ever come to see." Both the Doctor and Logan had strange boyish grins on their faces, nodding while mumnling incoherently. Whatever went on between them, it was odd, even for the Doctor, she thought.

The man reached a hand towards the Doctor, shaking his quite firmly. "My name is Charles Xavier, but most here simply call me Professor. And you are?" The Doctor shook the man's hand back as firmly, smiling politely. "The Doctor," he answered. Xavier sat for a moment, apparently waiting for the Doctor to add something, but then simply turned to Rose. "And the young lady would be?" Without thinking about it, she curtseyed as she said her name, enjoying for some reason being called a young lady. Either that, or the man simply left a charming impression. He was old and completely bald, but impeccably dressed and had an aura of soothing calm about him, making her feel very comfortable in his presence.

"And you, my good man," said the professor, pushing a small control stick on his motorized wheelchair to make it roll closer to Ron, "are quite interesting." Ron looked at the others with a nervous smile, thanking the professor for the compliment. "Would you mind much if I took a look at that wand of yours?"

While Rose and the Doctor did their best to not react childishly at the man's choice of words, Logan made no effort to hide a laugh. The professor seemed not to care, though. As Ron carefully pulled the little wooden wand from his jacket, the professor almost handled it as if it was more fragile than snow and might fall apart in his hands. He looked at it closely, examining it from several angles, then gently returned it. "You and I should talk at some later point, mr. Weasley." Ron looked at him with a mix of his usual nervous expressions, and quite a bit of confusion. Xavier simply smiled. "You are not the only one to know some unusual tricks, my friend," he said, turning his wheelchair around.

"Professor, are you sure this is a good idea?" asked the man who had joined them, the man with the stylish sunglasses. Rose had not noticed it the first time he passed them by, but the glasses were a crimson red, making her think of rubies. Or of blood.

"I like to fancy myself a good judge of character, Scott," the professor replied, "and from what I long ago gathered from Logan, this fellow is nothing if not a suitable ally." He let the big, bluish-white door perform a scan of his eyes, then turned his wheelchair around, looking right into the Doctor's eyes. Rose was not quite sure if she saw what she thought she saw, but she could have sworn there was a respectful humility in the Doctors eyes as they met with Xavier's. The two looked each other in the eyes in a peculiar way for a few seconds, before the professor finally rolled to the big, round door as it opened, greeting him with a disembodied voice.

Behind the door was a very large, completely round room. Not round as a circle, with flat floors and ceilings, but round as a sphere. Rose was about to follow the professor and the Doctor inside, when she felt a firm hand on her shoulder.

"Trust me, kid, this is not a room you want to be in without good reason," said Logan in a firm but friendly voice, more as if he was protecting her than holding her back. Ron didn't need the advice, staying put where he was, and Rose decided that if the Doctor trusted this man, so could she. When the round door closed behind the two men, she felt less certain of her choice.

"Listen to you, Logan," said the man with the red glasses, Scott, "being all fatherly and concerned for others." Logan rolled his eyes slightly with a sigh and a smile at Rose and Ron.

"Before we go any further in this. I must ask you to be more clear with me, Doctor," said the professor, stopping right before he entered a circular platform suspended in the middle of the big, round room. He paused, seeming to gather his thoughts, then turned the wheelchair around.

"I've known Logan for a while now, and his past is still a bit of a mess to the both of us," he said, pausing again as if to weigh his words carefully. Whether he was trying to not offend or deciding which secrets to speak openly about was hard to judge, even for the Doctor. "His future, however, was something I thought we would simply create as it came, day by day and year by year."

The Doctor nodded silently. He knew where this was going, although typically, it would be some poor fool trying to take advantage of foreknowledge, or some meddler meaning to toy with time in petty ways. This professor did not seem to fall anywhere near either category.

"You knew Logan in the timeline," the professor stressed that word, clearly not a fan of it, "which was lost when he came back to warn us about Trask and the Sentinels." The professor paused, again, and the Doctor nodded, still silently. Xavier was clearly now having great trouble expressing in words what was going through his mind.

"To your knowledge, does that timeline still exist? Are mutants there, my people," said the man, some of his powerful aura slipping, making him seem vulnerable, even in pain, "are they still suffering? Is this thing still real?"

The Doctor remained silent. He neither nodded nor spoke, or in any other way responded to the professor's question. For once, he was failing to find words he felt were appropriate.

"As I understand it," he finally said, "you are perhaps the most powerful psychic of our time, am I correct?" His words were soft, softer than he would speak to almost anyone not battered and bleeding. Even Rose would need to be in a dire pain for him to speak to her in that voice. Like the professor, there was now a lot of connections to personal pain in this conversation for him, too.

Xavier nodded, clearly struggling with his preference towards humility about his skills. With a heavy heart, and careful not to drop it over the edge of the walkway leading to the small, round platform, the Doctor reached into his jacket. Hesitating one last time, he took out the psychic paper, looking at it in his hands quietly for a moment.

"This," he said, avoiding the professor's eyes, "is a piece of psychic paper. Where I'm from, it's a small plaything. To most in the universe, it's a piece of paper that shows them whatever I want them to believe it shows, even if I want it to show them what they themselves expect." He looked at the professor for a moment, making sure that, even though it was simple, none of his explanation was being missed. The professor seemed unexpectedly calm and reasonable in light of being told these things. "To people with some psychic abilities, or simply very sharp minds, it's just a piece of blank paper. It doesn't trick them, so all they see is that." He took a deep breath, closing his eyes for a second, then opening them again. "For someone with highly advanced psychic abilities, it is an instant answering slip of anything they might wish to know of me." Looking straight into Xavier's eyes, he flipped the leather holder of the psychic paper open, exposing the paper, before giving one final instruction. "I'm sure you could search through my mind and find a lot of things, even if I resisted. But you would be stumbling about in the tangled swamp that is the memories of someone several centuries old. If you want to, this will answer everything you ask about me. But I need to know that you want this, because not all answers are good ones."

As much from his words as from the look in his eyes, Xavier knew the gravity of what the Doctor was telling him. He had walked through many minds before, and it was always a murky, disturbing, and most of all, chaotic ordeal. But he had, through the time travelling mind of Logan, spoken to a version of himself caught in a blistering hellhole of a world in perpetual war on mutants.

He had to know.

The door slid open with a soft hiss, causing the air to shift slightly in the hallway. The professor, rolling out slowly in his wheelchair, had a grim look on his face, and said nothing. Behind him, the Doctor wore a different facial expression, but more a sad one, one perhaps of regret or uncertainty.

"Scott, be good and fetch Kitty Pryde for me, will you? I think she's in Ororo's class now." Scott seemed about to ask a question, but Xavier never waited for it, driving his wheelchair to the elevator without even looking at the man, or anyone.

Rose looked at the Doctor, leaning in to whisper at him. "What happened in their?" she asked. The Doctor, much like Xavier, didn't look at her as he answered, but simply kept sending a painful stare in the professor's direction. "Too many things, Rose, too many things." He then sighed loudly, patted her on the shoulder, and did his very best to smile a bit. "Come on, we have work to do!"

Chapter 17

Driving through downtown Sacramento, Mulder kept looking out the windows for signs of anything out of the ordinary. This was not entirely unusual, and had increasingly given Scully a preference for driving, in order to avoid his attention deficit to cause a crash. But for the most part, it was idle curiousity, little more than his very strong aversion to boredom. This time, it was a bit different. He was looking for actual signs of trouble.

"There are no reports of anything out of the ordinary, Mulder. I think our roadrage suspect is completely unconnected to the company itself." She put the car into a soft turn, following the instructions on the now muted GPS. In the passenger seat, Mulder leaned back, his attention to the surroundings lessening at the prospect of just seeing another city roll by.

"Anyway," she continued, "this is a subsidiary, what exactly should we expect from them? They probably deal with completely different matters from their parent company." She didn't have to look at him to know that he was going through his sunflower seeds at an alarming rate. He was bothered, not just by not making any connections that appealed to his sense of mystery and conspiracy, but by the feeling that people might be dying because of their lack of progress.

"You're sure the police in Las Vegas were dealing with the incident there?" he asked, sounding a bit worried. Scully nodded. They had been in contact with local police through FBI agents, and they had been assured that everything was under control. Even if they had been too late to stop the perpetrator from causing damage in the first place. "We should be in Colorado, dealing with the situation there," he grumbled under his breath.

Finding a suitable spot to park not far from their destination, Scully didn't get out of the car, instead staying in her seat with a heavy look to her. She had heard the reports come in from Colorado Springs as much as he had, but she also knew that they were FBI agents, not military. "What would you do, Fox?" she asked, finally looking at him. "If you were in Colorado Springs right now, what would either of us be able to do to help them?" Rather than answer her, Mulder pushed the door open in a clumsy, dissatisfied manner, pretty much barging out of it rather than just exiting. Scully sighed and got out herself, less dramatically.

"We've got a psychopath on a bloody rampage across the western states, Scully, and all we can do is have coffee with the local cops. Doesn't that strike you as even the slightest bit odd?" The remains of sunflower seeds flew off his suit like dust in the wind, and he brushed them off as fervently as he could. "I mean, this is clearly our old stomping grounds. The bizarre, the unnatural, the..." "Spooky?" Scully interjected. Mulder looked at her with accusing eyes, but at least he seemed to lighten up a bit.

"People are dying, Scully, and it's our case." With a resounding thud, Scully closed the car door, slipping the keys into her pocket. She stood for a moment, trying to see the situation from his point of view, but he was being emotional. Again, nothing new.

"It's not our case," she said, heading towards the building across the road at a fair speed, hoping to make Mulder run sufficiently out of air to talk less. "You asked the director to go lend a hand to the local PD, and he let you." She sent him a calm, lightly concerned look. She had been worrying about his mood these last few years, hoping he would find some peace of mind after all that had happened over the years. "I swear, Mulder," she said, half laughing, "you and a handful of crazy cultists around the world are the only people who are actually depressed by the fact that the world isn't showing signs of ending in 2012 in a hail of Mayan fire from the sky."

Mulder shrugged, finally shutting his bag of seeds with the rubber band.

"You never know, Scully. It could still happen."

The front entrance of the place was rather impressive, in the "we spent a lot of money to impress you" kind of way that most big companies used to appear worth betting your cash on. The painted glass sign at the main entrance was a mosaic of hexagons, with the word "ANTIGEN" inside its own, much bigger hexagon in the middle of it. Scully scoffed a quiet laugh at the name. A bioengineering company whose name was just a prominent component of the body? It was like calling a new car brand "Engine".

"Mulder, something tells me we have the wrong people. These guys are clearly just a wellfunded ploy to make politicians cough up money for technical advice that any high school geek could..." She stopped, spotting the man already heading their way as they reached the entrance. He stood patiently for a moment, waiting until they crossed through the automatic plexiglass doors.

"Welcome," he said, looking at them with a friendly smile clearly meant for wealthy clientel. Scully produced her FBI identification, smiling just as friendly so as to not make the man uncomfortable. He looked surprised at her, then at both of them. Mulder realized she had identified them already, and showed his ID just to follow procedure.

"Aha," the man continued, "and what can we do for the nation's law enforcers?" He turned, making a hand gesture that they could follow him to somewhere presumably more comfortable, and a lot less public, than the main entrance to the building. Dana followed politely, while Mulder was a bit slower, hesitantly watching everything for signs of... anything, really.

The man was a bit shorter than Scully, which, for a man, made him below average. He was clearly older, too, although he seemed in fair shape and vigor. He wore a knee-length lab coat, which was deceptively clean, making Scully suspect it was more for show than work. Either the man had quickly changed, which meant he saw them coming, which was kind of unsettling, or he was at the very least not the kind that did a lot of the lab work. A supervisor, perhaps, or administration. Although that seemed a bit odd, sending someone of an actual rank to meet strange guests, it seemed just as odd to assume a company dealing in labwork employed greeters, like the average shopping mall chain. Nothing was outright suspect, but it bothered her, somehow.

"We understand that you deal in military contracts here?" said Mulder, not so much asking as telling the man that they knew that. The man, not showing any signs of regret about that, nodded as he sat down in a very soft couch in the lounge area, bidding the two agents to sit with a wave of his hand. "Yes, we do a lot of government work, and the military is a big part of that. Most of it is in countermeasures for worst case scenarios like bioterrorism or epidemics," he said in a kind but matter-of-fact tone of voice. The answer didn't bother Mulder, at least not as much as the way the man seemed completed unaffected by it.

"You wouldn't by any chance have had problems with some kind of performance enhancers lately, would you?" continued Mulder as he sat down in the couch opposite of the man. The man seemed bewildered by the question, finally shaking his head.

"No, I'm sorry, agent..." It took a second for Mulder to realize the man was asking a question, not simply being formal. "Mulder. Agent Fox mulder, and this is agent Dana Scully," he said in his best conversational tone, and Scully reached forward and shook the man's hand. "And you don't seem to carry a nametag of any kind?" Mulder asked back. The man, apparently from pure reflex, looked at his own chest pocket, then smiled. "Oh, sorry, no. We have installed a new radio ID tag system. I really have no idea how they work, but they do, and everybody here knows me anyway." He extended a hand to Mulder. "Jacob Lane, Director of Antigen." Mulder smiled and shook his hand. The smile, this time, was genuine. It wasn't every day a big company sent it's high-ranking staff to talk to a couple of agents.

"But as I was saying, agent Mulder, no, we have had no incidents of any kind, really." He looked a bit at a loss for words, then continued. "To be perfectly honest, I fear most of what we do here would seem incredibly boring. Mostly we just assemble biochemical compounds on instructions from other researchers." He folded his hands in his lap, his one leg dangling softly over the other, making him look like nothing more than a lab rat with a bit of restless leg syndrome. It all seemed nice and neat, making Mulder feel very much like he was being lied to.

"So no performance enhancers?" he asked for clarity. Lane seemed to weigh his words very carefully this time.

"We do have some projects down that path," he admitted a bit hesitantly, "but of course I am not at liberty to discuss the details, not even with the FBI." Finally, Mulder felt like he was getting back in the dance. Secrets, little white lies hiding, no doubt, bigger ones. Powerful groups manipulating things to their own end. "Be broad, then," he said to Lane, sending the man a very friendly smile to indicate that he was not going to end the conversation that easily.

The Sacramento sun was high in the sky, making the streets feel like they might begin to sizzle at any moment. Mulder was deeply regretting not leaving his jacket in the car, but taking it off in the middle of the street was not very becoming of a senior agent, either. Scully seemed less focused on her attire. In fact, she seemed very bothered by something.

"I don't trust that man," said Mulder. He felt that, with his reputation of seeing conspiracy in every cup of nooddles, he should elaborate, but he was mostly just left with a strange feeling after the conversation with the director of the company, something he couldn't quite put his finger on.

"I completely agree," Scully replied. Mulder nodded, then stopped. He stood at the back of the car, just looking at her. "What?" she said, stopping to look right back. "I can't be a bit skeptical of someone? Did you trademark paranoia or something?" Even though she was clearly annoyed, Mulder just smiled at her. It was like seeing your firstborn child ride a bike for the first time!

Scully got in the car, gesturing for him to do the same. Mulder couldn't help but think to himself that, for what was essentially still a beginner in paranoid suspicions, she was showing quite a bit of talent! Removing his jacket and putting it in the back seat, he got in, ready to hear what could have pushed her over the edge and into his realm of, according to the majority of people in his life, madness.

Starting the car, Scully looked out the back, presumably to back out. Mulder spotted her sending the Antigen building some harsh looks, though, making him suspect that she was concealing her observation as safe driving.

"Our dr. Lane seemed to be awfully specialized for a man claiming to run a company with such wide variety of products and services," she said, putting on her best driving face. Mulder was actually beginning to worry that she felt they were being watched, and he fought the urge to turn and look for hidden observers himself.

As they left the area, she continued. Mulder noted that she was not driving out of the city, but rather into it. "Everything he talked about was basic genetics, very rudimentary," she said while driving through the city streets as if she knew them by heart, convincing Mulder once and for all at the female gender's superior skills at mutitasking. The GPS no doubt helped, but still. "A company of that size, and a scientist in his position, would never be just doing the biochemical equivalent of grunt work."

It occured to Mulder that she had never let the man know that she had any medical background. She had only ever introduced herself as an agent. In fact, she had never introduced herself at all, barely speaking. He grinned, trying not to let her see, but her eyes were on the road anyway. She was good.

"So what was he hiding?" he asked, enjoying very much the role reversal that seemed to be going on at the moment. Scully squinted, something she only did when angry, or thinking, or both. She didn't like being lied to, and she was definitely thinking, so both were the likely answer.

"I'll need to get some employment records to get a better idea. I could try to see if the bureau will help with it," she said, giving him a quick glance as she finished. "Unless you have a better idea?"

Mulder leaned back, his face a testament to the joy he felt. They were getting back in the saddle. "I may actually have something," he said, teasingly.

Going back through the row of labs lining the hallway, Jacob Lane grumbled under his breath. FBI agents, and at this time. They clearly had no idea what they were looking for, but the mere fact that they were looking bothered him. They had plenty of samples from the thing in that basement, but nobody had been expecting it to suddenly just walk out of the containment. He knew they should have kept it somewhere close, but no, orders said to keep it at a remote location, for whatever reason. No doubt the upper echelons wanted deniability. They kept fearing some specimen breaking free like a movie monster, eating people and attracting attention to them. He had little love for them in general, but he had to finance his work, and they paid well. But preventing efficient study of the organism, just to minimize some unlikely risk of a specimen escape, that was just...

He sighed. If the thing had been in his care, in his facility, it would have needed far more than to simply punch through a reinforced concrete wall. Coincidentally, as he thought that, he passed by the row of containment cells, deep inside the building. Had he already walked that far? The serum was working better than expected already! Feeling good about himself, he stopped to admire the specimen closest to him. Through the transparent section of wall, he could see the cryostatic chamber clearly, the specimen inside looking like it might wave at him at any moment, just for the heck of it. This one was an order to be shipped, to some cabin deep in the woods. A leftover from the old Demon Research Initiative, from the old days, before hunters and other vermin started getting too full of themselves. Now, even covert government groups were tasting blood, wanting to enact genocide on Jacob's new family.

Tasting blood. He smiled as he thought about the irony of that phrase. He suddenly felt hungry.

Chapter 18

The car was quiet. Sitting in the back seat, little room to move, Spike finally broke the silence. "All I'm saying is, you two have a past, and he called you darling and love. Or luuuv," said the vampire, doing a very poor imitation of Crowley. Angel, who was sitting uncomfortably beside him, said nothing. Instead, he shifted his legs again, trying to make them fit the available space. Had he been sitting behind Sam, that would have been even more impossible, but even behind Dean, the room to move was limited.

"Crowley just talks that way," Dean said with a tired voice. The sun was up high now, and he had a sleep deficit to repay at some point. He always had a sleep deficit to repay.

"Anway, I thought your angel friend could just fluff us away on a cloud or something, why are we crammed into this old tin box?" Hearing the vampire deliberately berating his car, Dean made a quick brake and acceleration, throwing the back seat passengers forward. Angel, pinned into place by his big legs, just rocked slightly back and forth at the jerking motion. Spike went full force into the back of Sam's seat, giving off an outburst of pain that put a smile on Dean's face. "Remember to strap in, kids," he mumbled quietly under his breath.

"Cass is a bit picky about his cloud passengers," said Sam, clutching his laptop in hopes that the little move with the car was Dean's last attempt to punish their unexpected passengers. "Besides, I thought you were about to ask for the car's hand in marriage back in Vegas." He smiled to himself. "If there was anywhere that would be legal, it would be there."

"I was baiting you, mate. And I might add you seemed quite taken by the act, Brain and Pinky," the vampire loudly complained. Dean fought the urge to make another punishing brake.

Sam ignored the backseat comments, reading through the news feed again. The signal out on the highway was not that great, but his laptop had been amplified with a few tricks he had learned from Ash long ago. "There is a lot of stuff happening in Colorado," he said, talking exclusively to Dean. "The route matches, the description matches, the images match the witness testimonies..." He turned the laptop in his lap to let Dean get a glimpse without taking his eyes off the road too much. "Wow," he said. "Seems Michael Bay moved into town recently."

Behind them, Angel and Spike both leaned forward to look at the screen, as well. Lacking room for both of them to squeeze between the front seats to look, Angel pushed Spike back with little care for his wellbeing. "Oy, mind the leather," the smaller vampire complained, loudly, causing Sam to notice them both and close the laptop down.

"What's with you vamps and leather, anyway?" mumbled Dean, clearly not wanting an actual answer. "Also," Sam added, "he does have kind of a point, Liam. Or Angel, or whatever." Sam turned in his seat, looking at the big vampire now sitting back, staring blankly out the window. "It's Angel," he said in a low, seemingly tired voice. Sam nodded. "Okay, Angel. What exactly did Crowley mean by knowing you back in the Pit?"

It clearly bothered Angel to be asked that, and when he didn't answer right away, Spike filled in. "Angel's little girlfriend, whom, by the way, I also found very enjoyable..." This time, Spike was ready and ducked Angel's elbow as it came for his face. Angel glared at him, making Sam fear that the big guy might put on his fighting face and start a vampire fight in the back seat of the car. "Sorry, that was insensitive of me," Spike apologized, seeming almost, but not quite, sincere. "Anyway, this girl we both knew had to shut down some demon thing, and she did it by kicking Angelus here through a gate to Hell." He looked at the big guy, but Angel apparently had no conflict with the story as it was told. "To make matters worse, the two were a couple at the time, so you can imagine the sore spot it left on old Grumpy here." Spike flinched when Angel straightened himself out a bit in his seat, turning his head to look at Sam. It was clear that he was not happy about digging out old dirt.

"In the Pit, I came across this Crowley guy, back when he was just a con artist causing Lucifer a few headaches now and then. He had a real way with words, I was a bit messed up after the whole Buffy thing..." Sam looked at him with a confused expression, but Angel quickly caught it. "Buffy, the girl. Anyway, Crowley tried to recruit me as muscle in his plans to mess with the order of things, and I joined him, for a while." The whole car stopped, slamming both Angel's knee and, again, Spike's entire face, into their respective front seats.

"You did what now?!" practically yelled Dean at the man. Both vampires were completely dumbstruck by his sudden outburst. Angel, once he got over the sudden yelling, looked at Dean with cold, angry eyes. "You have no idea what being in Hell will make a person do," he growled, to the point that his vampire face started to show. It never came out completely, though.

Dean's knuckles around the steering wheel were nearly white as he turned his eyes back on the road, his breath being far too rapid. The Impala gave a jolt through everyone in it as he throttled it up, going forward in a more reckless manner than either one in it liked. After a few seconds, as the car reached cruising speed, he calmed down, though.

"Trust me, he knows," said Sam, his eyes not quite meeting those of the big vampire in the back. "We both do."

The awkward silence in the car lasted for nearly a minute before Spike elbowed Angel, gesturing for him to continue. Sighing, he did. "So, anyway, as I was saying..." He paused, making sure everyone was calm and collected, or at least close enough to it for him not to get thrown into the seat in front of him again. "Crowley had a bunch of plans back then, and he was getting every confused and disgruntled demon on his side. I belonged in the confused pile at that point."

There was a brief silence, but Dean, who still had some anger in his voice but was otherwise restraining himself, picked up the conversation. "So what happened? What did that jackass end up making you do?"

Angel gave off a quick laugh. "He sent a bunch of us to make a move on one of Lucifer's prize pets, a guy called Alastair." Sam instantly looked at Dean, but apart from a distant, painful stare in his eyes, he seemed to be doing alright. "It was a slaughter," the vampire continued, "but some of us had seen that coming a mile away and stayed out. Turns out it was just another sacrificial pawn in Crowley's bigger game, making Lucifer look weak by making Hell look out of control." The big vampire's voice fell quite a bit, the reliving of old memories not doing him any favors. "Crowley was too scared to punish those of us who bailed, afraid Lucifer or Alastair might find out he'd orchestrated it. But seems in the end, Crowley got what Crowley wanted." His voice was full of resentment, something Sam noted that Dean agreed with.

Sam himself turned back in his seat again. In his mind, flashes from Lucifer's Cage popped up, but he managed to keep them from leaking out.

"On a different note," said Dean, clearly getting as worried about Sam's memories as Sam was about his, "you said you had friends on this thing's tail?" He looked in the rearview mirror to catch the eyes of Angel, but found no reflection. To the best of his abillities, he pretended not to be disturbed by that. "Mind elaborating on that?"

The small team of soldiers stood at the entrance into Cheyenne Mountain, not sure if they should be terrified or impressed. "This is insane," one of them mumbled. Their squad leader nodded. "This is not an average target, Angel made that much clear," he said, adding a "lock and load" cliche to make the troops snap out of it.

They'd faced down monsters and assorted weirdness before, some of it even in residentual areas like this one. It was only a matter of minutes before the place would be crawling with military forces, but if things went as they tended to do, most of those forces would be underestimating their prey, and be underqualified for the task. Riley's team had experience with this sort of thing, no matter what that meant. That was the theory, at least.

Inside the tunnel, the huge blast door was half open, a large hole in its side. Riley knew the build of doors like that, and the hole no doubt exposed the locking mechanism, allowing someone to force it open from within the lock. He stepped to the side, rifle trained on whatever might pop up in front, to get a better look at the damage done to the door in particular, and to the entire tunnel in general.

"Okay, people, looks like we're dealing with someone who can break open heavy blast doors via internal mechanisms. That means strong, smart, and skilled," he said, waiting for confirmation from his team. There was no time for a briefing, everything was on the fly. They had been dropped in knowing only the usual: Bad stuff was going down, and anyone not equipped for it was cannon fodder.

The inside of the base looked as bad as the outside. Smears of blood were scattered around the place, although only a few bodies were visible. Bullet holes were everywhere. And little charred pieces of meat on the floor. Those bothered Riley more than anything else at the moment.

"Alejandro, give me a brief on those bits of meat on the floor," he said loudly, making sure everyone, including Alejandro, took notice of them. He could hear the rattling of Alajandro's gear as the man knelt down.

"Synthetics," he responded behind Riley. "Looks old and slightly spent, clearly grilled hard recently, though." Riley took a deep breath. Synthetic flesh, that was Initiative stuff. What was it doing in here?

Gunfire rang out somewhere below. A lot of it.

Chapter 19

Strange and ancient energies bolted through conduction systems only known by few and fully understood by none. In the deep cold of the Antarctic, the energies found an old conduit, surging into it with the power of several dying suns.

"This... is not good," dr. Beckett complained in an accent so thick, even those nearby barely understood him.

In the emptiness of space, overlooking the soft, blue-white glow of the planet Earth, a solitary vessel hung in orbit. Visible only close up, covered from all else by a web of cloaking devices, the ship had the sleek looks of an aquatic predator, but nothing moved. It was silent, merely watching.

Along the inside of it, hallways lay silent, only the faintest hum of the ship's constantly powered engine ringing through. At had the aura of a tomb. A very large, intimidating tomb. Deep within it, several stasis chambers held the crew, the clan, of the ship. Other chambers held their captured prey. The ones that still remained alive, at least.

When the alarms first chimed, they were gentle, a blip running the length of the ship, its details coded in its tones and rythm. The one awake member of the ship's clan made its way towards the controlb bridge with a moderate pace, knowing the importance of both the signal and restraint. Not one aboard lacked the cool temper of a warrior, a hunter, a deadly predator. The Yautja respected little, if anything, else.

As key crewmembers were awakened, as suggested by the ship and confirmed by this one member on watch, they gathered in the control bridge to examine the holographic displays that had come to life within it. None of them made sense. The surge of energy coming from the planet below seemed without a focus, without a central source, and gave no indication of having a path or a motive. It was haphazard, jumping all around the place, racing through geological features and subspace manifolds without purpose. It seemed accidental, but the power of it was too great to be a natural phenomenon. Then, without warning, the energies seemed to zero in on the southernmost continent, Antarctica. The place of death.

"Rodney, this is not making any sense," yelled Beckett over the communications array, "the energy is not releasing, it won't pass through to your side at all!" He struggled to keep an eye on all the readings as the surge of energy steadily grew. It was like funneling a tsunami through the reservoir of a dam. It was only a matter of time before the dam would burst from the pressure!

On the screen, barely peeking through the static, the face of dr. McKay could just be seen. He seemed a bit frantic and frustrated, but very much engaged in the situation. "The... but if you... zero point... release... or to discard..." Beckett just watched, making little flapping gestures to signal a complete lack of understanding back to McKay. "I don't understand, Rodney, can you perhaps write it? Write? Write?" he repeated, again and again, hoping it came through. He finally decided to practice as he preached and found some paper and a thick pen. He only hoped the resolution on the screen would be enough to make his scribbles stand out.

Before he could jot down anything, the was a sudden drop in the intensity of the energy surge, as if something had managed to drain a portion of it away. The equipment almost seized sparking and screaming in those painful, mechanical tones of twisting metals, and lighting dropped almost down to normal. Then, the rings dropped! One on top of the other, the transport rings readied for incoming teleport. Becket looked at one of his assistants. "Everybody uses the elevator here... right?"

The final ring landed in place with a deep thump, that went through the entire base as a string of echoes. Dr. Beckett stood frozen, not knowing exactly what how to react except to observe closely as whatever events would unfold unfolded. Inside the rings, lights flared up for a brief moment, before two beings stood inside, tall, brutish beings, darkly clad and holding spears.

Beckett turned the screen. "Rodney, something just came through, I have..." The screen exploded in a cloud of sparks as a powerful spear crashed through it, making a sizeable cut in Beckett's coat in the process. "What?! HEY!" he yelled, turning to see the assailant. Standing more than a head higher than him, the thing wore a metal mask and gear that would appear like that of a soldier, had it been more rigidly ordered. As it were, the majority of tools it had were more or less just strapped in whereever there was room on the body, it seemed. Apart from the mask, from which strange, wormlike dreadlocks ran down the torso of the creature, the one notable thing in a mess of accessories was a set of displays mounted on its left arm. The creature kept shifting its gaze from the surroundings to that display, while its companion kept eyes trained on the people in the base at all times.

Beckett's heart was pounding, his life nearly flashing before his eyes. Barely blinking, eyes on the creature at all times, he clutched the desk behind him, to keep from falling over. "Are you Ancients?" he asked, but the creatures did not react. "Goa'uld? Kull? Ori?" For each option in the list of beings he imagined he might be looking at, Beckett's voice grew weaker and more unstable.

As soon as the two beings strode through the room and out, clearly looking to search other parts of the base, Beckett signalled everyone to head for the elevator, which, luckily, was not the direction that their two guests had taken.

Meanwhile, across the frozen continent, two small ships half landed, half crashed into the ice and snow. Not affected in the slightest by the crude arrival, the pilot of each ship disembarked, the ships cloaking and becoming one with the sight of snow even before their pilots stood on the frozen ground.

There was barely anything there. Snow, ice, some rocky outcroppings. Here and there, old wooden beams reached out from the ice, like dead animals slain in the midst of their desperate escape from the cold and inhospitable climate. The two beings, metal masks and assorted gear like those in the Antarctic base, scanned their landing spot closely. After those few seconds, one started off in the direction of the ruins of an old whaling station, while the other began a casual jog towards a large crater in the ice.

Chapter 20

The room was filled with hushed conversations, despite there only being a few people even there. Rose and Ron sat at the table nearest the Doctor, at the head of, well, the class. Quite literally; it was a classroom, although a better one than Rose remembered from her school. The Doctor tried to get a hang of the projector, being helped by a very understanding, sympathetic woman that Logan had called Storm, although the others called her Ororo. While that went on, Rose took a brief glimpse at the class, so to speak. Logan was there, as was the red sunglass-wearing man named Scott. A tall, slender woman was sitting next to him, the two clearly a couple. The professor was not yet present, apparently having a very pressing appointment with someone called Kitty. Rose had no idea who that was or why it was so pressing, but the look on the professor's face, coupled with simple politeness, made her not ask questions.

Two participants that had scared Rose to pieces when she first spotted them were sitting at the far end of the class, one of them broadshouldered enough to need his own full table. Both had blue skin, an effect that the Doctor had quickly noted to her was quite a normal side-effect of strong mutations. Rose had heard, and on less than proud occassions used, the word "mutant" before, usually meant to hurt other people's feelings and make them feel unwanted. Here, that word had a very different meaning. Or both, if some of the remarks of these people were true.

Also, she was pretty sure the smaller of the two blue guys had a tail, but his weird facial scars were enough to keep her from asking him face to face.

"Ah, victory, at last!" proclaimed the Doctor loudly, beaming of joy and anticipation as the woman, Ororo or Storm or whatever she was meant to be called, sat down close to him, keeping a constant eye on both the equipment and his use of it. The latter was of more worry to Rose than the former, to be honest.

The white projector screen on the wall was blank, except for a clumsily drawn green circle, which was simply labeled "US". Rose was confused whether it meant the group present, or if the Doctor just had no idea how to properly draw the outline of the United States.

"This," the Doctor said, dramatically swishing and pointing a long, thin metal stick at the green circle, "is us." Rose nodded, immediately feeling a bit silly for needing to show the class that she understood this fairly simple bit of information. At least the Doctor was not just showing off miserable abilities in geography. "Now, most here have a basic idea of time travel..." he continued, but was promtly interrupted by a "nope" from Scott, who had actually raised his hand as if asking for permission to speak. The Doctor stood frozen for a little while, clearly having expected a more prepared class. To others, he might have seemed nervous, but Rose recognized the signs of him thinking very hard about how he could say what he wanted to say without spending a lot of time giving thorough details. The great irony of him was that in spite of being a time traveller, he had surprisingly little patience.

"Uh, sorry to ask," said the smaller blue fellow, "but who exactly are you?". Apparently, not everybody knew the Doctor, as Rose had half expected from the moment he and Logan greeted as old friends. "Remember when we talked about the whole bad future thing, Kurt?" asked Logan. The blue guy nodded, an unsettled frown on his face. "Well, this is the guy who helped me straighten out the mess that it had made in both my head and the world." The blue guy looked half confused, half hurt. "You mean the mess of us still being alive?" he asked, sounding like he was honestly worried that Logan might have regretted whatever the decision involved was. Logan just laughed to himself, and the big blue guy gave the smaller one, Kurt, a reassuring pat on the back.

"Kurt is right, Logan," said the big blue one, "it might be more enlightening if your friend told us who he was, and why he has gathered us here today." It was strange for Rose to hear a perfectly human, though slightly deep, voice come from the large blue one. He looked more like a blue lion in human clothes, size extra huge, than someone who might take part in an improvised seminar on the dynamics of time travel. Then again, he seemed to be holding an elegant pair of reading glasses. This place was hard to get your head around.

The Doctor looked at Logan, who nodded, and then took a deep breath. "Hi!" he said loudly, turning to the class, waving his hand, clearly exaggerating his presentation. He really wanted to get on with it, that much was clear. "I'm the Doctor. I'm a Timelord, meaning I travel through time." He then said nothing for a moment, simply looking at people, smiling overly politely. "Any questions?" People hesitated, then everyone but Logan and Rose raised their hands. Including Ron.

"Look," the Doctor said, his voice dropping a bit and his hands coming up to signal everyone to calm down. Which was a bit odd, because everyone was remarkably calm and relaxed, considering his rather overwhelming introduction. "I could start explaining everything, and we'd still be here after Christmas is done with. I come from a distant planet that is no more, and I travel in time. I helped Logan here deal with some things after he had a mental time travel episode, and now, I need your help."

The big blue guy spoke again, his voice getting more and more human and well spoken with every sentence. "I am sure that we would all like to help a friend of Logan's, Doctor, but you must allow these people time to wrap their heads aro..." "Time is, ironically, what we have little of," the Doctor interrupted. "Look, everyone, I don't mean to rush or pressure you, but things are occuring right at this minute that will bring your planet into grave danger."

A hush fell over the crowd with the announcement about danger. What surprised Rose was that not one of them seemed upset by this concept, as if danger either meant nothing to them, or was an everyday occurence. Even Ron seemed remarkably calm and attentive!

The Doctor took a deep breath. "I just recently returned from an unplanned trip to what would be the year 5137," he said, stopping for a second afterwards to confirm the math in his head. "I'll skip the long explanations, but it appears that someone has started colonizing your world through time." Every hand in the class went up at almost the same time. Including Logan's. And Rose's. The Doctor stared at the forest of palms in front of him, then ventured a guess. "Colonizing through time travel means having a lot of people go to different times and set up permanent residence, all at once." Most hands went down, including Rose's. She glanced around the room, surprised to find Kurt still holding his hand up. "How can everyone do something at once when they go to different times?" he asked. The guy was more perceptive than he let on.

"Ah!" the Doctor responded, "we have a thinker in our midst!" He then began drawing a lot of circles in different colors on the projector screen. "The value of doing something at the same time in time travel is, that you scatter along the same timeline," he said, drawing a bright orange line through all the circles. "Any changes made throughout the timeline as a consequence of the travellers' actions will thus not affect the other travellers at departure." He turned and looked at the faces of the people present, clearly surprised at their lack of sudden understanding. "It basically means that no matter what anyone does in the past, they are not preventing their fellow colonists from jumping into time to do their own thing." Most nodded slowly at this summary. Rose did, too, hoping that she had grasped the basics of the concept just half right.

"Wait," said the big blue person, "if we're talking about colonization..." He paused, although it seemed more for drama than a need to phrase his next sentence. "... where are the colonies?"

The Doctor all but beamed for joy. This, quite clearly, was where he wanted the discussion to go. "The colonies, my good man," he started, the big, blue thing adding "Hank" in there to give the Dcotor an actual name. "Yes, the colonies, my good Hank, are hidden throughout your timeline." The room filled with low mumbling, although people seemed to more mumble to themselves than to each other. The Doctor quickly cleared the screen, then drew some clumsy stick figures and what looked like tiny cities with a few highrisers each. "On the average day," he continued, "anyone of you may be forgiven for thinking that your world has run out of places for anyone to hide." He then drew one tiny city, adding a dome around it. "But anyone from a sufficiently advanced culture might easily hide from any satelite or the like, or simply infiltrate your world to keep their presence a secret."

Rather than another round of mumbling, there was an eerie silence throughout the room. Finally, after seconds of nobody saying a word, the woman sitting by Scott raised her hand, although she did not wait for anyone to ask her to speak. "So these colonists of yours scattered all throughout time, right?" The Doctor nodded. "So they have essentially been here forever?" The Doctor started to nod, then squinted, clearly thinking. "Well, I'd gather they've been here since the Hadean era, at least. So since the Earth was very young, yes". The silence came back, everybody seeming to need a second to soak in the new information. "Then why should we worry?" the woman asked.

This was the point when the Doctor actually started to look really uncomfortable, the same sort of uncomfortable you would see on the face of someone about to tell a friend that the friend's house had burned down. He squirned a bit, looking at his hands a lot and making some odd faces as he tried to find the right expression for the message he was conveying. "Why do people build colonies?" he finally asked.

Not expecting a test, everyone else now had pensive expressions on their faces. However, the big blue guy, Hank, answered the question with a worry in his voice. And for a voice that powerful, from someone his size, the sound of worry was, in itself, unsettling. "Because they are either aggressive conquerors," he started, "or because they are trying to escape something more powerful than themselves."

The Doctor nodded, a grave look on his face. "The latter seems to be the case," he added. The crowd started to become restless, so much so that Scott began to get out of his chair, but was gestured to sit down by both the woman beside him, and Logan. Ron was looking everywhere at once, clearly worrying what this room of very unusual strangers might do, while Kurt was talking to Hank, the only one who seemed calm and collected.

"They are on the run from someone who will stop at nothing to prevent them escaping," the Doctor interrupted, causing everyone to fall a bit silent again to hear what he still had to add to the story. "And the ones hunting them have launched an assault right now, in your time." Kurt was the one to ask the next question, although both Rose and Ron were surprised that he had somehow moved all the way to the front of the class, standing behind the chair in which Storm sat. "How do they want to hunt the colonists by coming here? I mean, by coming now?" The terminology of time travel had bothered Rose a lot, too. She had simply learned to ignore the strange sentences one might say because of it.

"They are not planning to hunt the colonists," the Doctor said, dropping the electronic pen for the projector on the table in front of him. "The plan is to rip your timeline apart, effectively pulling the ground away from underneath their prey's feet." He stood in front of the class with a look in his eyes that even Rose could not quite remember having seen before. "They intend to annihilate everything and everyone you ever knew or ever will know to keep them from escaping. The nuclear response to unwanted time travel."

"Is such a thing even possible?" asked Hank, his voice still unreasonably calm. The Doctor nodded. "Yes, my own people were wiped out by destroying the primary timeline of my homeworld," he added in a heavy, painful voice, making it clear to Rose where the unusual look in his eyes came from. "How do you know that?" asked Kurt. The Doctor was suddenly very quiet, looking very small, not meeting the gaze of anyone, simply looking down at the electronic pen on the table. Or, more likely, looking straight through both pen and table, his mind's eye filling up with bad memories.

"Because I was the one who did it."

In the gardens of the mansion, the kids of the school were playing. As they sat there, Rose could watch a group of kids, any group, and start seeing samples of their mutant powers. Some moved in inhuman ways, too fast or too far. Some made objects move to or away from them, while others were clearly sending secret messages to their friends somehow. One ran straight through a wall, landing in a puddle that she instantly merged with. It was a very unusual sight, but in the end, it was what she might see any afternoon back home: Kids playing.

The Doctor was sitting next to her. It was only the two on the bench, Ron taking a bit of time to talk to some of the people at the school who were interested in his magic. Apparently magic was not even close to the same as the mutations that seemed so commonplace here. But at least it gave the Doctor time to collect his thoughts.

She had never seen him like this. He had been angry, he had been worried, and he had even been sad. She had seen him afraid or confused. But she had never seen him like his. She had never seen him look outright beaten.

"I'm not going to let your world burn away like mine," he finally said, although he did not look at her. He ways sitting with the brass cylinder, holding it with his fingertips, each hand on one end of it. He seemed lonely, looking at it as if it was the picture of long lost friends or family. In the end, it might as well have been. It was a relic from his home, a place no longer there.

"Is it Daleks?" asked Rose, trying to focus his mind to bring his usual, energetic self back into the fray. The Doctor was about to answer, but stopped himself. He seemed unsure of what to say. "Cybermen?" Rose asked, trying to help him along. He slowly shook his head. "When I saw them, in 5137," he said, speaking in a slow voice, clearly thinking, clearly recalling what he had seen and examining every corner of those memories of the future, "they had Dalek technology, and I am fairly sure also some from the Cybermen." He paused a bit. "The Daleks gave it to them." With those words, he again fell silent, his attention fully on the cylinder containing the sonic screwdriver. "So," Rose started, making it clear in her voice that she was trying to drag an answer, any answer, out of the brooding time traveller, "who was it? Who did the Daleks actually give their technology to?" she asked, her mind unable to grasp the idea of Daleks actually lending their technology to others.

"The worst ones possible," said the Doctor. His play with the brass cylinder stopped, and he put it back inside his jacket pocket. "People, Rose," he said in a weary, yet angry voice, standing up slowly. "They gave the technology of time travel to people."

Chapter 21

The engine of the black Dodge Charger roared like a pack of rabid lycans as the car raced down the highway. The carnage along the road had been impressive, even by Selene's standards. The assorted sites of car crash after car crash were being cleaned up by authorities, sure, but the lines that the damage had drawn in the landscape would be visible for years to come. The first leg of the journey, up through Las Vegas, had been fairly eventless, but after this... thing got a hold of the Ferrari, all bets were off. Something told her that it was not the best highspeed driver around.

"When we get to Colorado Springs, we need to make a stop," said Blade, the tall, black man that had told her to give the agents that pivotal clue. At least, that was what he seemed to believe it was. Umbrella. Selene had heard of them, but only in passing. Shady types, lots of financing, two things that never added up to anything good.

Sitting in the back seat, she twisted and turned as the car did, avoiding reflections in the car's mirrors. The sun was high up now, and she was feeling uncomfortable with the potentials for exposure. She was pretty sure that he had made a statement, though, not asking for her permission. He had a reputation. It was not for asking for permission.

"Problems with something?" he asked, his voice containing a bit to much joy for her liking. He was not out to kill her, that much was clear, but he had little respect for her overall wellbeing, too. She said nothing, letting him enjoy his upper hand for the moment. She had yet to decide whether she wanted to simply kill him at an opportune moment, or if she quite honestly could. Daywalker. A vampire, but only half so. He was not quite as powerful as other vampires, at least not from birth, but he had other advantages. The immunity to sunlight was a big one. And he seemed to have made up for the disadvantages of his half human birth through training. She wondered how he aged, though.

"You know, your kind isn't as tough as everybody seems to think you are," he mused, no doubt smiling, even though she had no desire to try to spot it in the mirror. "I mean, even aside from the whole sunlight and garlic thing, a good blade slices you up astoundingly well. Might have thought thicker skin would be in the best of your interests."

He was trying to get under her skin. It was part taunt, part strategy, making sure she never spent too much time thinking up nasty plans, keeping her in the grips of emotions, mainly impotent anger, to cloud her mind.

"What's with you and Umbrella, anyway?" she asked. Not because she cared, but if he spent his words on answering, he didn't spend them on bothering her.

The man made a grunting chuckle. "Umbrella is a bunch of psychos with a budget that seems to never run out," he answered, his voice somewhere between disdain and deep thought, as if it annoyed him that he had an interest in the company. "Lots of what they do is pharma, and they're pretty good in viral engineering. Most of all, they have absolutely no scruples about their work, none at all." He fell silent, but it was clear to her that he had more to say on the topic, so she just waited. "Got me a serum," he added, confirming her expectations. "Keeps me from being a daylight model of you freaks." She took no offence at his remark. She had been a human once, but over time, she had learned to hate and fear them, too. And the way things were evolving, she was growing less and less of a fan of her own kind every day, as well. "Tried to see if they had something that might do a better job of it. Of course, things don't always turn out as planned." He made an effort not to give off a telltale sign of what he meant, but she merely had to wait and watch a few seconds before he let a hand run across his right thigh, trying to make it seem as if he was merely scratching it.

"The mess with Deacon Frost," she said, making a point of not continuing the sentence, leaving it instead to hang there, like a question packaged as a half statement. He reached out and turned the rearview mirror, causing her to duck quickly to avoid a nasty sunburn. She was not sure if he expected her to duck in time, or wanted to assert himself. She liked neither.

"Guess you vamps talk a lot, huh?" From her position, sprawled out on the backseat, trying to keep out of every beam of light that might punch through to her, she just made a low grunt in response, letting him keep the talking portion of the conversation running. "He's gone now. Took him down." He made his typical dramatic pause. "Took them all down." In the back, listening to him half brag, half complain, she smiled. "And La Magra?" He laughed out loud at her question. "Your so-called blood god? That went to vampire Hell along with Frost," he half chuckled, half growled at her.

"Don't be so sure of yourself," she mumbled, ducking the sunbeams as he turned the Charger down towards Colorado Springs.

Staying in the barely dark backseat, Selene watched closely as Blade got out, stretching and generally showing far too much enjoyment at being able to leave the vehicle. She ignored his subtle victory dance, adding it up mentally to just another taunt.

The small forest clearing was just outside Colorado Springs, far enough removed to be fairly unwatched by the significant police and military presence in the city. The carnage of the Ferrari driver was not that clear at this spot, the most notable thing being a long scorchmark in the road. But whatever made that did not have the four wheels of a car. It looked more like a motorcycle.

Blade continued to simply stroll about outside the car, but at this point, it seemed clear to her that he was done with the taunt. He was waiting for someone. Meanwhile, Selene herself was getting restless. She was not used to being confined like this, trapped inside a steel box, surrounded by daylight, at the whim of some halfbreed with an agenda so unclear she almost doubted he knew it himself. She was feeling cabin fever growing in her!

Finally, a dark cloud gathered outside the car. Like an explosion of coaldust filmed in reverse, it sucked itself together in front of Blade, taking the form of yet another darkly clad figure. This one, to its merit, had patterns of white crisscrossing its skin, and a red cape that seemed to work on principles that had nothing to do with wind or fabric. Selene, however, most clearly noted the glowing green eyes. She could just barely overhear their conversation. Neither of the two had a knack for discretion.

"Yes, he sent something to this place," said the caped one, his voice sounding like a roar through stone tunnels. "The word around Hell is that someone of immense power is ripping at the fabrics of reality." Blade just stood there, silently listening. "What is coming is beyond me, or Hell," the figure continued. "There will be strange bloods spilled soon, but even worse..." Selene noted Blade's shift in attention, his interest rising as the figure spoke. Selene, too, was gripped by something running down her spine as the figure paused for not much more than a second. "... word from the man across time has it, that what is coming may have been commanded to rip that fabric entirely apart, leaving nothing."

Whatever the figure was, Blade handed him something, and he disappeared in the same cloud of dark dust he had come from. Selene was fairly sure she saw chains swirling through the dust before it varnished, but at that point, the figure had already broken her sense of what was real and what was not.

"What was that all about?" she asked as Blade sat back into the car again. He was quiet. It did not seem as if he refused to answer her, it seemed more that he was at a loss for what exactly to say. "Something bad," he finally growled. As he turned the Charger to leave the clearing and get onto the road again, an old Chevy Impala nearly hit them, racing by.

Chapter 22

The corridor was aflood with warning lights and panicked screams. Riley and his team had now caught up a bit with the source of this devastation, clearly moving faster through the complex by not having to fight everything in their way. Whatever was in here, it was not welcome, and therefore was not part of the overall base. The enemy of my enemy, he thought, hoping that the operators of the base would quickly realize that he and the rest of the team were on their side. They had fought those they tried to help before, a sad effect of working in secret. Nobody trusted the strange armed guys they did not know.

One sign that they were catching up was the fire. Bodies were no longer just charred, they were burning, their eyes burned out of their skulls and their clothes set on fire. "You ever seen anything like this before, jefe?" asked Alejandro, and Riley shook his head. "Demon?" That was a harder question. There were clear demonic signs in the carnage, the ruthlessness and singleminded destruction reminding him of many a demon-hunt. But this seemed so much more... militant. A demon might go crazy and leave a trail of destruction in its wake, but that had a clear pattern of randomness, of attacking targets because they were easy prey. Whoever did this had a mission.

A sign on the wall said "Gateroom". The letters were bigger than other signs, leaving the distinct impression that this room was very important. A bit down the hall, a bigger sign said the same. Near it stood a figure. Fire. A figure made of fire and leather, that was all he could see. "Hostile spotted," he whispered to the team, and everyone went into combat formation, covering each others flanks. "Charley, what do you make of..." He never got to finish the question, as four gas cylinders flew right by them, tumbling down the corridor before they blew up. The shockwave sent to of his men down the hallway, while the rest slammed flat to the floor. The floor option was not without its pain, of course, with the various weapons they were all wearing, and landing on!

"Status," he said, a bit louder. One of the two men thrown down the corridor sat up, struggling not to collapse, but alive. The other seemed to be writhing in pain. Alive, but not well. All the rest chimed in with confirmations of life.

"What was that, boss?!" asked Charley. She had a mix of anger and pain in her voice, a mix that Riley knew all too well. She was ready to kick someone's ass, out of principle if nothing else! He loved her for it, but this was not the time. "We are dealing with something in a fight," he said. "What is fighting what?" came the obvious question back, and he made a displeased grunt as he got to his feet.

In the gateroom down the hall, gas cylinders were rolling around everywhere. The hulking humanoid, its human skin now all but gone to reveal its robotic figure, was using them as more obstructions than weapons for the flaming, leatherclad skeleton. The impact of the throw and the heat of the flames made the occassional cylinder blow up on the spot, but most just tumbled down the corridor outside at high speeds, still hot from the mere touch of the burning skeleton. The skeleton, in turn, roared in anger, taking every chance it got to hurl a long, spiked chain at the fleshy robot.

In the control room above, Jack was trying to take in everything explained to him by every technician present. Finally, he shouted at them to be quiet, and they clammed up. "Carter, give me a status. What the living hell is happening down there?!" Samantha took a deep breath, gathering herself and her thoughts, while checking every screen in the room, almost all at once. "No idea, sir. That... thing smashed its way down here to get to the gate, and the burning... thing seems to want to kill or capture it. The whole mess seems to be a case of an unstoppable force hitting an unmovable object. We're just collateral damage." Jack looked out the cracked and scorched window to the gateroom down below. "But why here?!" he said, voice full of impatience. If the two things were just slugging it out without a care for their surroundings, it was only a matter of time before the whole place was one big smoking pile of rubble.

"Wait, wait," interrupted one of the technicians. Jack felt he should know the guy's name by now, but most personnel here was becoming a blur to him. This was not the old, straight-forward days anymore. One team, one mission. This was more one place, one mess, and the currently unfolding event did nothing to disprove that. "The... robot is not just here by accident. Look at this," continued the technician, replaying the scene from earlier as the humanoid robot entered. The burning skeleton had not yet arrived to pester it, and they could clearly see the robot fighting its way to the gate. "It wants the gate for something. It's not trying to destroy it." Jack nodded. It wasn't much, but it was something. "Sir," said Samantha, clearly thinking hard about whatever she had in mind. "Does that mean the burning skeleton is on our side?" There was no way between Heaven and Earth that Jack could give an answer to that.

"Talismans? Holy water? A freaking ice bucket challenge?!" Charley was giving suggestions, but this seemed to call for something more powerful. "Holy water," he said with doubt in his voice. She handed him a vial, and he put his best throwing arm into it, hurling the vial down the corridor. To his great surprise, the burning skeleton actually took notice, sending out a growl at them as a puff of steam rose from its shoulder. "Holy water, lots of it," Riley howled at the team, and everyone grabbed their vials.

Watching closely on the monitors, Jac and Samantha both stared at the unidentified group of soldiers in black fatigues, hurling little glass bottles down the corridor at the burning skeleton. "What are they trying to do? Put out its fire?" Samantha shrugged at Jack's question. "Whatever it is, it's distracting it. Look!" she said with a nervous voice. Jack turned his head to the monitor showing the gate in the gateroom. The fleshy robot was taking a step closer to the gate with every moment, the skeleton was distracted. As it reached the gate, it duck down behind the scaffolding, turning its back completely on the skeleton.

In the doorway, the skeleton finally opted to simply walk into the gateroom entirely, shielded from the unidentified soldiers by the thick walls. Ironically, the distracted skeleton allowing the robot to turn its attention to the gate meant that the now distracted robot was not preventing the skeleton from advancing.

A roar went through the entire structure as the skeleton let an array of chains hurtle out from its fists, like snakes jumping out from behind a bush. Each and everyone of them latched onto the robot, but most just tore away remaining pieces of flesh, leaving the robot with more exposed metal, but not the slightest hindered in its work. The two chains that did get a hold of it only managed to pull it back a bit before it tore at them with its entire body, causing the skeleton to lurch forward before the chains lost their grip entirely. As if the skeleton was merely an annoyance to be endured, the robot went right back to work on whatever it was doing to the Stargate.

Then, it snapped the panel shut that it was tooling with. As if its purpose had hereby ended, it stood up erect, immobile for a moment, then turned its now entirely metallic head towards the skeleton. Even from the control room above, Jack and Samantha could see the glowing red eyes inside the gleaming metal skull. And while it might have been purely because it was now without flesh, the thing seemed to be grinning at them all.

Sparks shot out of the gate, a reddish lightning crawling from the smoking panel to encircle the entire gateway.

The Doctor froze in midwalk. Rose turned at the sound of his gasping. His eyes flickering, he stumbled backwards and fell to the ground. "Doctor, are you okay?!" she asked in a voice on the verge of breaking. He was struggling for air on the ground, his eyes fluttering like butterfly wings. Unresponsive to her question, he lay in her arms for what seemed like an eternity for her. Then, his eyes relaxed, and he stared into the sky as his breath turned regular once more. "Doctor, what happened?" asked Rose as the tall man clutched her arm with one hand, the ground beneath him with the other, pushing himself up.

"Time," he said in a low, exhausted voice. "Time just broke, Rose."

Chapter 23

"McKaaaaay!" shouted John Sheppard throughout the large hall. Down on the floor of the open area, Rodney came running, a bitter and confused look on his face. "I... Don't... Know!" he called back, then disappeared somewhere beneath the walkway John was standing on. There was no need for questions or explanations, everybody was painfully aware of what everybody else wanted to know. "What the Hell is going on?!" shouted John out into open air, putting the collective mindset into six simple words.

The chevs on the Stargate were spinning like The Freaking Wheel of Fortune, and sparks were flying from things that, quite honestly, should not be able to throw sparks. Every sensor was acting like it had its wires crossed with the audio output of a drunken rock band, and even the stabilizers of the entire Atlantis infrastructure. It had started out as little more than some static on the monitors, but as they had lost contact to the Stargate back on Earth, everything had gone insane all at once!

"Joooohn!" came the yell from downstairs suddenly. John looked over the balcony and saw McKay now running out towards the stair, speeding up towards him. "Remember..." he said, then realized he had exhausted all his air and gripped John's shoulder on the verge of collapsing. "Oh god..." he muttered, clutching his chest. Growing a bit impatient, John finally helped the exhausted scientist stand upright. "John, remember when you went 40.000 years into the future?" John nodded. "48.000 years, but yes." There was a silent moment as McKay looked the colonel in the eyes. "Yes, John, please do focus on the absolutely LEAST important part of my dying message," he snarled sarcastically at the man. "Anyway, I ran some calculations on the computers that actually still work. Which means my cell phone, basically. And the data from back then seems to not exactly match this, but to at least have some similarities."

John stood still for a moment, letting go of the man. Then he slowly began to try and phrase his thoughts. "Rodney, do you mean that Atlantis is going into the future?" The look on McKay's face would have been priceless, had the situation been any less dire. "No, John," he complained with what seemed like an actual full-body frown. "I mean that something is opening the gate through time instead of space." Rodney panted heavily, still catching his breath. John was now fully ignoring the sensitive scientist's suffering. "Something is coming here? Why? How? And what?!" Putting two fingers on his nose and rubbing it, more to signal his feelings of intellectual superiority than to relieve a headache, McKay took a deep breath. "In sequence of asking: I don't know, I don't know, and, oh dear gosh, I don't know, John." The silence between them was tense, as the chaos continued to unfold around them. "Rodney," said John in the sternest voice he could muster, "how much do you know?"

Looking out over the sparks flying everywhere and people running to put out fires, both literally and figuratively, Rodney seemed less the scared or outright hysterical sort he usually did, and much more just deeply terrified. "I don't know much, but judging by the rough data, I'd say something really old, at the very least several millenia." John hid his face in his hands to clear his thoughts for a moment. "We are very, very far from home, Rodney. Heck, we're in a completely different galaxy. And you're telling me that, other than being cut off, we can now expect some uninvited visitor from long, long ago?" Rodney nodded, squirming uncomfortably as he did.

The building still shook from violent failures and failing stabilizers. John stood in front of the Stargate, firearm at his side. There were options for shutting the gate, causing anything incoming to either be lost or slam into a closed gate, but those options required control over the facilities. That control was not theirs at the moment. They were not given much of a choice in how to react to this, and he wanted to know why. But there was nobody to ask.

At his side, Ronon was getting antsy. John appreciated his combat abilities and pure, well, enjoyment of the fight, but at the moment, he was there as a fallback option. Whatever was coming, they had no idea how it would act, or react to them, and if all things went belly up, Ronon was not a bad ally to have by your side. He was, however, far too eager to join the fight, making John worry he might end up starting it.

Around them, encircling the Stargate, were every soldier they could round up in the limited time. Plenty were on emergency assignment around the city, keeping damage and especially injuries or worse to a minimum. A quick headcount told John he had a good twenty men and women at his disposal at the moment. It seemed like a gamble, but with all the uncertainty, anything might.

"In 3, 2..." John jabbed McKay in the ribs, gently but firmly, and he stopped the countdown. There was no need to put everybody more on edge than they already were. Everything threatened to fall apart around them, or kill them in a burst of rampant energy, and there was, after all, no guarantee that something bad was coming. He had seen good things come from terrifying circumstances before. Anything might cause the systems to act up. So he kept telling himself.

With a flash and a grinding sound, the gate came alive! It was not the soft shine of the watery surface it usually made when allowing passage through, but instead a reddish crackling, tiny sparks shooting out as if it was overloading. "Hold calm, hold steady!" he told the troops, wanting none of the drama to set off unsteady triggerfingers. They were good soldiers, loyal and disciplined, but the current situation could push anyone too far for reason to guide them through it. And then, the reddish static disappeared. John felt something close to relief at seeing the water-like event horizon form inside the mighty ring, sending the soft flash out across the room. The waves across it seemed a bit more violent than it typically was, but that could be the heightened tension playing tricks on him.

Everyone waited. Not breathlessly, or they would have passed out. Seconds went by, then the first minute. Every ten or so seconds, Ronon made a grumbling noise, beginning to speak, but John cut him off with a wave of the hand before he could say anything coherent. The wait was inescapable, and it could not be allowed to make anyone more uneasy or careless.

With everyone starting to fear a false alarm, two shapes suddenly stepped through! Rising outward from the blue event horizon surface, the two stepped out in military formation, giving John less than an excellent feel about what they might be hinting at to come. As they emerged fully, John gave them a look, up and down, trying his best to assess the risks they faced. Military, for sure. Armor, looking flimsy but light and efficient, smaller sidearms strapped to their sides, large firearm carried in hands. A rifle of some kind, requiring two hands to steady, it seemed. The carried them the same, both of them, and they walked in locked step. Military, and disciplined. But his evaluation efforts were cut short when a third figure stepped through the event horizon.

The contrast alone was enough to make the three look unnerving. The two identical military ones were largely white, their white armor and helmet covering them almost entirely. Gaps for flexible movement, along with some ridges on the helmet that looked like gasmask filters, and the sunglass-like per-eye visor, were all black, but they covered only a tiny fraction of them. They were bright white to any casual observer. The other figure was not. From head to toe, it wore nothing but dark black, the only semblance of color being a few bits on the chestplate, which looked for all the world like tiny buttons. Not clothes buttons, but those one might find on any technical device. Helmet, armor, even its flowing cape, all were as black as night. And it was giving off a chilling sound. It sounded like breathing. Heavy, angry breathing, like a wild animal or enraged person about to plunge forward into a fight. But it did not plunge. It stood silently at the Stargate, looking over John's soldiers, and examining its surroundings.

"Your displacement field is highly illegal," the black figure said in a disturbingly deep and eloquent voice, made even more disturbing due to the hint of reverb in it, as if there was a slight echo in that helmet. It was a male voice. A human male voice. "The ramifications will be dire," it continued, "unless of course you are wlling to submit yourself to a full surrender before things go any farther." John looked at the figure, unable to read between the lines due to the concealed face. "Identify yourself," he said in the calmest military voice he could muster. There was no reason to act in a threatening manner, not before he knew the stakes, but this was not a time for soft diplomacy, either. He convinced himself that he actually managed to not show fear when the black figure turned to look straight at him. "I am the direct representative of the Empire and the Emperor himself," the figure replied. Everyone fell silent.

"There is no record of an empire arond these parts, sir. So please, if you would..." John suddenly felt an unusual pressure against his throat, gasping for air with a choking sound. Desperately trying to grab whatever was holding onto him, he still managed to watch the black figure take a slow step forward. "I would not," it simply replied. "You are acting in breach of imperial law, and I see no alternative but to take full command of your..." The deep, semi-mechanical voice stopped abruptly, and John breathed deeply as the pressure on his throat disappeared. The black helmet turned a little less slowly from side to side, once more examining the Atlantis gateroom. "What is this place?" it finally asked.

Chapter 24

"I am telling you, that was the bloke from Vegas," Spike repeated, struggling to turn in his seat and look out the back without getting himself caught in the sunlight. "There was a cape and chains and all!" Dean tried to look at the whitehaired vampire through the rearview mirror, showing not an ounce more trust now than he previously had, but was again unsettled by the lack of reflection. It was like having voices in your head, talking to what for him looked like just an empty seat back there. It only made him even less trustful in the guy. But he had noticed it, too. "I'm more concerned about that special ops looking dude," Sam added, mainly for Dean to hear. "I've seen him before," Angel pitched in, seeming unusually calm for someone at risk of burning to a cinder if the sun caught him by surprise. "He hunts people like us. Vampires."

"People," came a small, but very sarcastic, chuckle from Dean. "Whatever you want to call us," Angel added, "he hunts us. Half a vamp himself, but not the sunburn half. A daywalker." Dean nodded. "A vamp with full-body UV filter, just freaking great," he muttered, mostly to himself.

"So, this Bessy," Sam started, turning in his seat to look back at the two passengers. "Buffy," they both proclaimed at the exact same time. "Okay, this Buffy person, how does she fit into all of this, exactly?" The whole previous story about Angel's past had brought up as many questions as it had answered, and although he feared that was a trend that would continue, Sam was feeling that more information might make things a bit easier. Also, the silence had been killing him.

"Well, you know the stuff you two blokes do?" asked Spike, a slight hint of contempt in his voice. Sam nodded, Dean ignored the conversation in general. "Well," the vampire continued, "she does it too. Only she's pretty good at it." The vampire wore a smirk as he fired of that last insult, and Dean could read it in Sam's eyes, even if he couldn't see the little bastard in the rearview mirror. He would have given the creep a piece of his mind, too, had he not suddenly spotted Castiel on the side of the road. Every passenger in the car let out a complaining sound when he, again, brought the vehicle to an abrupt halt.

Exiting the car, Dean and Sam both looked at the angel with some concern as he walked slowly to the car, a dark expression on his face. Inside the car, they could hear the two vampires start a muffled argument about something, no doubt this Buffy character, but neother of the two brothers really cared to be a part of that, not even just to follow the argument.

"Bad" was Castiel's only remark when he suddenly skipped the whole walking thing and simply appeared at the car. Dean gave a startled gasp at the sudden jump, but immediately tried to man up again. "Thank you, Walter Cronkite," he said in his typical displeased tone, "but you may need to elaborate on that." Cass looked both of them in the eyes, one after the other, and they could not help but notice the harrowed look he had on him. "It's bad. It's very bad," he elaborated. After a second of uneasy silence, Sam gestured him to give them something more solid. "It's complete chaos in there. Police, military, fire department, everything. I even think I saw the Salvation Army stand guard at the city limits." Dean and Sam looked at each other for a moment, but quickly and wordlessly decided not to dig too deep into that last remark. "Something came here, something powerful. Not just the thing we followed from Los Angeles. Something dark and strong. Something that burns unnaturally." He stopped at that, looking at the brothers as if expecting them to take something profound from his description. "You'll need to learn the meaning of the word 'elaborate'," Dean added, but he fell quiet when Cass looked at him with a mixture of anger and concern. "We should not go there," he simply added.

The Impala parked just far enough away from the National Guard blockade att he edge of Colorado Springs to attract the attention of the soldiers posted there. One of them actually began walking towards the car, weapon held in hand but not aimed ahead. Inside the car, the two Winchesters threw each other knowing glances, and Sam started looking through a small box of IDs. Stepping out of the car, Dean turned to the two vampires in the backseat. "Don't leave the car," he said with sarcastic concern in his voice. Before Spike could think up a snarky remark back at him, he shut the door.

Passing in front of his brother as they walked out in front of the car, he discretely grabbed the fake ID and pocketed it in a way they could only hope avoided detection from the soldier. At that distance, he looked maybe in his late twenties, not a rookie but not a seasoned veteran, either. "They are one Beetle Bailey away from scraping the bottom of the barrel, don't you think?" asked Dean in a hushed voice, even though they had a good thrity seconds before they actually reached the guy. Sam grunted in agreement. "If they are doing something this big but posting senior boyscouts here it can only mean..." "... that everybody and his freaking lifecoach is in there somewhere, fighting god knows what," Dean said, finishing his brothers sentence. "Hey, Dean, did you notice the skidmarks on the road back there? Looked burned or something." Dean nodded. He had not mentioned it at the time, but every corner they turned seemed to lead them into another omen of imminent doom.

"Sir, I have to stop you here. The town is under military control." Dean looked the soldier over. Late twenties might have been a bit optimistic, actually. He flashed the fake Id at the guy, who instantly looked at them, confused. "Sorry to ask, sir, but what is the CDC doing here? This is purely mi..." Sam interrupted him rather crudely. "This level of chaos always breeds disease. People get hurt and infected, crowds huddle together, and if you're real lucky, waste systems back up. Ever been inside a fully militarized zone before, soldier?". The soldier shook his head. "Anyway," Dean continued for Sam, "we were mainly just in the area, and the people back in Atlanta thought we should take an early look, before you have rats and people foaming at the mouth overwhelming your little blockade from inside the city. If it's okay with you, of course." A bit to their surprise, the soldier took another, slightly longer look at their fake CDC identifications, causing them to become a bit uneasy. That did not change when he took out his walkie talkie. "Sir, I have an agent... McLean and Dorough here, CDC, wanting entry, over." The look Dean gave Sam could rip paint off walls.

Then, a black Dodge Charger roared by, smashing straight through the wooden barricade.

"No, Clarence, I don't see your bleeding point," snarled Crowley at Castiel. "But then again, you angels always have the bird's eye view of things, don't you, skipping about in the clouds. So why don't you tell me." They were standing on one of the many mountaintops around Colorado Springs, looking out over the city. In the southwestern parts of the city, the orange flicker of fires could be seen even from that distance, crowned with a growing plume of thick, black smoke. "Angels don't sit on clouds, Crowley, that's a myth perpetuated by..." His voice trailed off as his eyes met the smirking face of the King of Hell. He was being overly literal again. He had to work on that.

"What I see is collateral damage, birdboy. A few eggs and one very interesting omelet." Castiel nodded, knowing full well Crowley's point of view in the matter. "You enjoy the chaos," he said, coldly, as he scanned the horizon. "You enjoy feeling like you are proving humanity to be inferior. Darwin's apes, not God's creation." Crowley let out a laugh that was a bit more forced than it needed to be. He was clearly amusing himself, but he also wanted to rub it in the angel's face. "Oh, you winged folk and your drama. If I ever need a speech writer, you are on the top of my list, C." He paused to get a reaction from Cass, but the angel gave him none. He just kept looking to his left, at the city as parts of it continued to burn. "Sodoma. Gomorrah. You're awfully cheeky if you try to look like your team of freaks have no blood on your hands. Your daddy made a statement back then, I'm just following in his footsteps." Holding back his need to point out that his daddy, by which he presumed Crowley meant God, was the father of them both, Castiel simply turned to face the demon again. "And what is that point, Crowley? No, what is it really?" To Castiel's surprise, Crowley's face turned bright red as an extremely angry frown ran across it. "That I'm bored!" he practically yelled, scaring away a few birds and a small lizard, leaving them now truly alone on the mountain. "I'm sick and tired of this. Do you have any idea how pathetic Hell is? How pathetic your own dear Heaven is? It's just two sanctimonious retirement homes full of endless bureaucracy and everybody whining about wanting another cup of tapioca from their dessert trolley before shooting their pitiful veins up with bad television. Did you ever wonder why tha man upstairs went for his big walkabout, did ya? I bet you balls to beanbag chairs that he was just fed up with running his neverending little benevolent dictatorship and went for a pack of smokes, then kept on walking."

They could hear the faint sound of sirens. Humans could not, had there been any on the mountain, but Cass heard them, and he knew Crowley did, too. "So you're just a little boy pulling wings off flies because you're bored," he concluded in his usual dry voice. Crowley's red face dropped the frown and cracked a smile. "Oh no, Clarence. I'm a very, very big boy, pulling the wings off of goddamn airliners and watching them go splatedy splat on your little apemen down there." It was strange feeling Crowley's breath on his face as the demon leaned in close enough to hiss at him without straining his voice. "Your homeboys wanted to trigger Armegeddon just to get things to move forward, remember?" the demon said in a low, passive-aggressive voice, while he politely wiped a bit of his own spittle off of Castiel's jacket. "All I want to do is enjoy a show. You know, watch the wacjy plot unfold, maybe run a bet on the whodunnit behind it all." Although no longer leaning into his ear, Crowley still stood uncomfortably close to Cass. This was no doubt by design. "I want some fun, Clarence. And this is fun," he finished in a calm voice, making him seem no less unhinged. Then he was gone.

Cass stood alone on the mountain. He tried not to think it too symbolic, for fear of being vain. "So," he muttered to himself, looking around to make sure the demon was not just standing behind him, listening in, "you just want to watch, do you?" Below him, the black cloud of smoke was starting to shroud much of the city in a thick blanket of darkness. "I guess that means someone else is in charge of this mess. Good to know." And then, there was no one on the mountaintop.

To be continued...


End file.
